


Irreplaceable

by unrivaled_tapestry



Series: Irreplaceable [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Abusive Parents, Angst with a Happy Ending, Doubles, Homophobic Language, Hurt Claude, Hurt feelings, Hypothetical CF + VW Hybrid Route, M/M, Suicidal Ideation, TWiSTD - Freeform, background Marianne/Hilda, canon-divergent, doppelgangers, hurt Lorenz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:08:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23663644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unrivaled_tapestry/pseuds/unrivaled_tapestry
Summary: Claude has never been happier to see Lorenz ride back through the gates of Derdriu. It can only mean he has declined his father's request to serve in the Imperial army—and that the Alliance could have a chance after all. But something is different tonight, and Claude can't quite figure out what's changed behind those sweet lilac eyes.
Relationships: Lorenz Hellman Gloucester/Claude von Riegan
Series: Irreplaceable [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2017652
Comments: 98
Kudos: 208





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Mega thanks to [InkSplatterM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSplatterM/) who beta'd and brainstormed this with me when I was like "I badly want to write a sad Claurenz fic", and to [GoldenThreads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/) who beta'd this as well.
> 
> This is my first fic for this ship, although I've loved them for a while. I'm expecting it to be two long chapters (probably more like two one-shots in the same fic).
> 
> Another quick note, this takes place on a Canon-Divergent hybrid route. Neither pure CF nor VW fit what I wanted to do here. Most simply put this timeline is: "CF, but Lorenz stays with Claude rather than joining the Empire and Things Change".
> 
> Content Warnings:  
> \- Canon-typical violence  
> \- Falling off a horse  
> \- Pretty graphic depiction of an injury about midway through

Lorenz’s horse, Belladonna, rocked him violently as they careened through the woodland trail, the fading light further darkened by scraggly trees. Her breaths came out in hoarse, strained coughs, and hoofbeats fell in quarter notes. The fear in her chest almost helped him drown out the sound of the pursuing party. He’d counted five on horseback, not considering the mages that had emerged at the canyon and rained death down on his battalion, leaving men bleeding and—

He couldn’t think about that right now.

Though they seemed organized, armored soldiers were slower—they couldn’t keep up with Lorenz, who had sailed up into his saddle and had been travelling light, but he’d lose that ground shortly. Few could claim his skill as a rider or the athleticism of his steed, but twilight had fallen, the road was treacherous, his pursuants wore black, and he was far from safety. The sound of his own heartbeat drowned in the sound of thundering hooves.

On the straightaway, one of the enemy cavalrymen drew up to Lorenz’s side, and he ducked his head in time to feel the whisper of a lance darting into the place where his neck had been.

Before it could be pulled back, Lorenz reached up to grab the shaft, and with a little bit of pressure from his outside leg, drew his mare to the side.

The attacker was already halfway off his horse before it occurred to him to let go of the thing, and in a second the weight in Lorenz’s hands grew lighter, and the horse next to him had no rider.

Lorenz discarded the spare spear behind him. That’s what they got for sending amateurs to kill him.

He missed the cart in the middle of the road until it was nearly too late.

Until it was too late.

Too dark to see, no time to prepare for the jump or decide if he could make it.

He’d been tossed before—not as often as Ferdinand, but the arena took its pound of flesh from him. He’d fallen into fences, slipped off on saddles that were too loose, any one of them could have killed him.

Rounding the bend, coming face to face with a broad bed of wood laden with heavy rocks, Lorenz had the crisp thought that this time it likely would. He felt the refusal coming, and tried to shift his weight backwards to compensate.

With a wild, panicked squeal, Belladonna slid to a stop, nearly falling onto her hind legs like a rabbit. Lorenz did not go over the front of her, but when she scurried back, he slipped free, into air, and into a bitter, overwhelming miasma of grass and soil.

Claude couldn’t figure out what felt different.

Lorenz said they would finish their conversation when he returned to Derdriu, and in turn, Claude had patiently waited. Visits to the wyvern roost, checkers with Hilda, pouring over notes and fortifications were all paltry distractions, both from the war and from the unfamiliar tangle in his gut.

Lorenz arrived through the gates that morning, and although he didn’t come to see Claude right away, he did send a quickly scrawled letter saying he would be at the duchal party later.

Claude watched Lorenz from the other side of the ballroom, approaching at a kind of leisurely pace. His pathway carried him around the dancers, behind the tables of fruits and cakes as he drew one ringed hand down to the cotton tablecloth and plucked a handful of grapes from a silver plate. He met Claude’s gaze at every turn, he twirled around a woman and a man in time to the quartet reaching the highest pitch of their song.

Lorenz wore a purple dress suit with white silk frills, and a hundred tiny gems on his sleeves and cravat made them sparkle around an amethyst tie pin. His hair fell in a satin wave, and Claude was madly reminded of springs squalls, the sun on sheets of rain. The whole ensemble was offset by a brilliant red rose blossoming out over his heart like a mortal wound. Claude thought it was the same old fabric rose, until Lorenz got close enough for him to smell the fragrance—not the thick, dizzy perfume of alcohol in the air, but a delicate, living sweetness.

Claude set down his drink with a passing page, and smiled in Lorenz’s direction; he hoped it came across as genuine, but sometimes he forgot which quirk in his lip made him seem more charming and less trustworthy. “So, you came back after all.”

Lorenz raised an eyebrow. “I’m offended that you thought I wouldn’t.”

“No, I suppose not.” Well, of course it had been in doubt, but for the purposes of foreplay Claude could pretend he’d always had faith. Lorenz played a dangerous game—hovering between the Alliance and the Empire. Claude could relate—he saw Edelgard’s axe on one side, and Dimitri’s lance on the other. He wouldn’t have blamed Lorenz for putting his life first. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you did. Your father couldn’t have been happy.”

“He's doubtlessly furious. I consider it a small price to pay for following my conscience back to Derdriu.” Lorenz’s grin grew a little wider, and his violet eyes sparkled sweetly. Somewhere in the distance, a violinist wailed above her accompanying viola, and the cello joined in. By the time the bassist started plunking on the arteries of his instrument, like the rhythm of a heartbeat, Lorenz slid closer, until his side was nearly flush with Claude’s, and Claude caught himself wanting to breathe in the smell of that rose, mingling with the cologne clinging to the edge of Lorenz’s throat. His hand slithered behind Claude’s hip, brushing with his belt—

—before producing a small lemon cake from the table at their six. As Claude gaped, Lorenz held the pastry delicately in his hands between them.

Claude tried to laugh out the flush in his cheeks. “Wow, give me a chance here, Lorenz. The judges would have called a foul on that one.”

“Then I would say they lack imagination.” Lorenz took a slow bite of the pastry, and Claude smelled salted butter, along with the rich marriage of sugar and sour wheat.

This was a reversal Claude hadn’t been expecting—for much of their relationship, it had been Claude pestering Lorenz. Claude frustrating Lorenz. Prodding at him, seeking weak spots that could collapse into any hint of genuine treason. When that turned into an unsteady friendship, which turned into a new courtship, it had usually fallen on Claude to send signals for what he wanted, and he’d needed to wade through the resulting fluster and hope he wasn’t misreading the room.

Tonight, Lorenz led the dance.

Different, but if Claude was under oath, he’d have to say he liked the result.

Claude had to run a hand down his neck.“Let me guess, I’ll have to earn anything else?”

Lorenz chased his bite of pastry with another grape, and positioned his head closer to Claude, so the precise shield of his hair helped block his expression from the party-goers, from twirling nobles and generals looking for wives. They could be discussing business, after all. State secrets. And Claude realized maybe the wine had been a little stronger than he thought, because the scent of the rose made his nose itch and his eyes water. It remained too delicate to be suffocating, but it felt like it was coating his mouth and throat, like honey.

“If you’re implying what I think you are, it is not necessary to earn that from me, Claude. You merely have to want it.” Lorenz’s free hand crawled out to the collar of Claude’s jacket, to toy with the badges there. Claude fought the heat under his cravat, and cursed how restrictive clothing was in Fodlan. He coughed.

His eyes darted outwards, and although a couple guests dared glances, he and Lorenz were mostly being ignored. That alone was odd—Derdriu craved gossip more than any other court. Granted, Fhirdiad didn’t know what fun was and Enbarr was too busy with warring and blaspheming.

Claude drew away, and he caught the confused widening to Lorenz’s eyes. He stood apart, and Lorenz feigned towards him.

He ran a hand through his hair, watching Lorenz out of the shade of his bangs. “Your father must be _furious_ with you right now.”

“This is not about my father, Claude. Count Gloucester is the furthest thing from my mind.”

Claude leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper. “It always has been before. This is just...it’s a little unlike you.”

“I have clarity I did not before. The fog has cleared, per se. I know what I want, so I offer once more.” Lorenz drew back, but didn’t seem to look hurt. He stared down at Claude, haughtily, hot candlelight dancing across his face, just as the quartet moved into a saccharine waltz. He half-turned, gesturing behind him. “Perhaps I should come back later.”

Claude sighed, and took a half-step after Lorenz. “No, please. I’m sorry. I'm not as good at this as I thought. Can we...maybe start over?”

Lorenz pulled lightly on the hand crooking his elbow, as if he’d been caught and captured, as if Claude wasn’t gripping him so lightly he could barely feel the whisper of fine cloth.

“I’d like to, but I’m having a hard time getting back into character.” That smile returned, catlike. “Perhaps a change of scenery will help?”

He hadn’t seen this side of Lorenz before, but Claude liked it.

A few days ago, Claude had ordered a vintage wine from his grandfather’s cellar be brought to his room. He figured he’d be drinking it no matter what happened, but he was glad he had it on hand as Lorenz lay languidly on his most plush chair, concerning himself with a chip in his lacquered nails. When Claude caught his eye from across the room, a thin smile grew wider. Red wine tumbled out into a pair of waiting, crystal glasses, each one the mouth of a bloody brook. Replacing it on the table with a dull thunk as the drinks settled down the clear sides, he slid over to Lorenz, handing him his glass.

Lorenz took it, eyeing Claude from the floor. “I fear I’m fully at your mercy now. I hope this isn’t poisoned.”

Claude cackled. “I wouldn’t do that to the wine. You know how expensive this stuff is?”

Notably, Lorenz took a sip.

“Hm, very nice,” he said, voice almost a purr as he sank back into the chair.

“I can’t take the credit.” Claude lifted his glass, vaguely in the direction of the Riegan mausoleum. “You can thank my sainted grandfather for that.”

“I’d prefer not to,” Lorenz drawled. “At least, not the way I’m planning on thanking you.”

Claude raised an eyebrow. “Really, it’s I who should be thankful.”

Since he’d maybe doomed them both now; that was an uncomfortable thought.

“Now that I’ve cast aside my ties to the empire and thrown in my lot with you, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to try it both ways.” Lorenz’s hand dropped to cup his crossed knee, and he gazed up, over his glass, over Claude’s reflection in the red.

He took his own sip, hoping the wine would do something for the feeling in his gut, and even that didn’t replace the smell of the flower. He drew back, pressing his hands between his eyes. “Lorenz, that flower is fragrant.”

With his hovering hand, Lorenz dipped down to the pin holding the rose in place and plucked the stem free from his suit. Claude found himself mesmerized by the brilliant shade of crimson, by the pale wounds marking the spots where thorns had been scraped off with the blade of a knife. With that hand, Lorenz dropped the stem in the basin of his wine glass, letting the tip begin soaking up the booze.

“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

“I fail to see the problem. It’s already dead.” Lorenz slid both hands along the arms of the chair, propelling himself up to his full height, which left Claude looking up at him. Lorenz moved into him, until their chests were nearly touching. “Besides, I have things in mind other than horticulture.”

“I’ll admit I’m disappointed, but you may be able to convince me.” Claude downed the rest of his drink in one go, and placed it gently on the table next to him—the one covered with maps and letters and notes, stained from tea and singed with ashes from Claude’s pipe. He smoked rarely, but the last couple days had seen more frequent use.

“Who knows what will happen,” Claude said. “Maybe with time, I’ll even tell you my real name.”

Lorenz’s eyes sparkled as his smile broadened. “My, my. The great Claude von Riegan, full of intrigue. I truly would never have guessed.”

Claude moved his hand towards Lorenz’s hip, waiting for any indication that he shouldn’t, before drawing him closer.

Raw, hot pain exploded under his ribcage.

It was a deep pain—one that radiated up into his head, down his legs, pronged at his back and made him gasp in air that felt hot and warm. His body flexed and lashed around frigid cold steel, around a blade that traveled along and held to the tears his skin, sucked at muscle pulling away from the metal driven deeply and quickly into it.

He staggered back, until he was away from Lorenz, until he could see Lorenz’s pale hand let the hilt of the dagger go. This freed Claude to stumble backwards.

“Oops. I really should be more careful,” he said, as Claude dropped to the rug on his floor. Blood soaked out onto his golden suit, warming it as the sensation spread, crawling towards the floor, stifled only by the presence of the blade. Claude’s hand reached for the hilt, then froze when he remembered that pulling it out would likely kill him.

“Lorenz,” Claude managed, before coughing up a wave of bubbling, reddish spit. “Why?”

“It looks like I missed your heart,” Lorenz drawled, thoughtfully watching Claude as if he were on display. “You’ll suffocate if you don’t bleed out.”

“Why?!” Claude gasped out, more forcefully this time, as if he didn’t already know. As if he hadn’t always known.

Kneeling down, Lorenz’s hand clasped once more around the hilt, and Claude reached up, intending to rip, to claw. His palm weakly glanced across Lorenz’s face, almost lovingly leaving a smear of sticky blood across his cheek.

Lorenz took in a sharp breath. “Ugh, you got it in my hair, you whelp.”

“Please don’t.” He wheezed around the sensation of his lungs failing, of the world starting to spin. “Please—”

The dagger came out with as much pain as it had caused going in, and Claude would have yelled if he had the breath for it. As it was, he made a long rasping noise, more like a sob, the last breath of a dying man. Which, he supposed, it was. He curled around the wound, his arms fighting to hold in every ounce as his fingers started to chill, as the shivering set in.

Lorenz wiped the dagger on the fabric of Claude’s shoulder before standing to admire his work. “You know, I really don’t know if you’re going to live or not, and I can’t decide which is more entertaining.”

“I’m afraid I have to be leaving.” He stepped back to the rose and the glass of wine, propping up the flower with his index finger as he downed the rest of the drink before placing them back down. “That _is_ good wine, though.”

“Lorenz…” Claude felt the shudder in his voice more than he felt the words.

“Don’t worry, Khalid.” Lorenz bent down, taking Claude’s jaw in his hand, forcefully arching his neck up. “I’ll make sure your mother knows what happened.”

A feeling as cold and sick as the steel sank into Claude, some deathly dread forming in his chest alongside his very real burgeoning demise.

He would die on the floor of his keep, he realized. It would probably be hours before anyone found him, and by the time they did, he’d be long cold and Lorenz would be well on his way back to the Empire. At least until morning, he’d be a statue to his mistake—after that, he’d be a cautionary tale.

He saw light as Lorenz left his room. As the door shut, silence reigned, broken only by the sound of his uneven breaths.

And he was alone.

He thought of his most trusted. He thought of Hilda. Then he remembered gardens—not full of roses, but coated with beautiful beds of jasmine and enormous flowering succulents, host to small, smiling lizards with bright scales. He thought of following his mother’s hand, stumbling after her in the early dawn. He thought of her alone in Almyra, where she’d receive a letter, written in a script lush as a rose, on a parchment signed in dry blood.

No.

Claude took a few rasping, steadying breaths, before propping his elbow up under his torso.

Not here. Not like this.

His body roared with pain, with chills, with fading light, as he crawled towards the chest at the base of his bed.

It might as well have been 50 feet away, for as long as it took him to slide across the rug, for every inch gained his head swam. He couldn’t hear his heart in his ears, even as his pulse thrummed hummingbird soft in his hands. That was a bad sign.

Finally, after a year, he reached the chest. He hauled himself upright, reached inside, his hand rummaging around, clumsily seeking the distinctive clatter of glass.

His hand grasped a vulnerary, dragging it out. He removed his other hand from the side, his blood-slick fingers slipping around the stopper. Damn it. Not like this. Not when he was this close.

“Claude, is everything okay? We saw Lorenz leaving and he had blood on his—Claude!” Words from outside of him hit his mind with a dull thud. He wanted to tell them to be quiet, because he was still struggling with the vulnerary.

“ _Claude!_ ”

It slipped from his fingers, landing on the carpet like a muffled chime.

And everything went dark.

Lorenz awoke to find out two things: one—that he wasn’t dead, and two—that he highly regretted that fact.

A terrible splitting in his skull made opening his eyes like a chore, and the light shining into them nearly inspired his stomach to mutiny. Overindulgence would have been the assumed culprit, had he awoken in his own bed, rather than outside, covered in dirt and grime, and were there not a thick crusting of blood near the back of his head and a raw track of skin at its root. It stung bitterly when his sand-encrusted hand found it, and he reflexively shrank away from the sensation.

When he coaxed his eyes to open, the first thing he noticed was that his horse was nowhere to be seen. As far as he could tell, no one was anywhere to be seen.

Behind him, a stream carried on at a languid pace. Up the hill, he could see the edge of the road he’d fallen from, but no trace of the men that had chased him. The sun also shone highly overhead, marking it as near midday.

In his mind, he began retracing his steps. His memory was fuzzy, but he remembered losing his battalion, and he remembered Belladonna rearing up. Perhaps he’d fallen into the creek, and they assumed he was as good as dead—he likely would have been, if not for the crest burning under his collarbone. Or perhaps they’d lost track of him in the dark, and their search had been interrupted by a passing caravan of some kind.

So, his refusal of Edelgard’s invitation had not been taken as well as he thought.

Or his refusal of his father had not been taken well. There was no way to tell whose shadowy agents had pursued him, or what their motive had been if not finishing the job or capturing him.

Either way, Lorenz expected heads to roll. He liked to think his father would have had him brought back alive, and he doubted Vestra would continue to suffer fools that botched an assassination so badly.

Lorenz drew himself to his knees, and was glad he hadn’t been soaked by the water. If he had, he likely would have frozen to death. As it was, he shivered in clothes wet from the dew, and gritted his teeth against the pain in his head. Searching around through his belt, he nearly split his fingers on the shards of cracked vulneraries, and swore more loudly than a noble son of Gloucester should.

With nothing else to do, Lorenz scrambled up the side of the bank, cursing the grass and mud stains on his lilac breeches. Madly, at the roadside, he searched the road for any signs of his mare.

There was no sign of her, and Lorenz kicked at the dirt. Those vile incompetents had better not have cost him his horse. A fine animal, wandering alone, would be too tempting for anyone schooled in their conformation. Brands could easily be muddied, or even ignored during a time when horses were likely to lose good riders off their backs in a battle. If she’d been found, she could be stuck pulling a plow, or carting a merchant’s goods. Either felt unacceptable, and Lorenz fought the urge to scream. He loved that horse, and loathed the thought of replacing her.

He started walking. Although that brought out several sharp pains in his legs—feelings of muscles or tendons not quite right—he was grateful not to locate any broken bones. So far, other than missing his horse, he was in much better condition than he had any right to be.

Poor, Belladonna. He would return her to his care if he had to pour money and promises not to litigate upon every farm from Derdriu to Myrddin.

About a mile down the road, he paused, straining his eyes to try and see into the distance. He heard a sound like rocks tumbling rhythmically over soft dirt, and he felt the comfort, the familiarity in that sound in the seconds before he realized it was a company of people on horseback—travelling at a canter, if not a full racing gallop.

He considered hiding—it could very well be the men who assailed him returning. However, he was tired, and more likely than not it was a patrol that could bring him back to the capital. On one side of the road was a sharp rock facing, and on the other side was the creek and the bank. He had done his fair share of scrambling, and loathed the idea of getting colder or more scraped up. Besides, maybe he could ask them in what direction they saw his horse running off before they slit his throat or trussed him up—either way, he wouldn’t need to worry about getting his armor replaced.

As the patrol approached, he saw the yellow heraldry of the Alliance with a deep sigh of relief. There was a company of 10 or so men, following a rider in the front.

“Lorenz!” Hilda barked out, swinging down off of her horse and stomping towards him while the other riders came to a stop.

“Hilda!” He felt a rise in his spirits. “Claude sent you to look for me? Thank the goddess, I—”

He felt the force of Hilda’s first on his jaw before the pain set in, and before the impact jostled his already tortured head and sent him spiralling to the ground to crumple like a top made of glass. The ground knocked the wind from his chest, and he barely had time to take in a breath before her hand was at his neck, fingers knitting into the space between his cravat and his throat. He couldn’t block her second punch—which slammed into his cheek and nose. He wasn’t sure if it broke, but he heard something pop under her knuckles.

“Hilda,” a voice called out from behind her, that he recognized as Leonie’s. As Hilda readied another fist, Lorenz brought up a hand, trying to get his wits about him, trying to find a spell in his repertoire that he could cast that wouldn’t hurt her, until he understood what was happening.

Leonie came up behind Hilda, her hands grasping at her forearm. “Hilda, you know what Claude said.”

“I know,” Hilda ground out. “But this snake, he…”

Lorenz coughed, spitting out the blood around his nose. Snake? He would respond to the indignity of that, if not for the dizziness, or the ringing in his ears, or the deep sense of foreboding settling in him. Something was wrong. Something had happened.

“That’s the kindest thing I could say,” Hilda said, as if seeing the offense on his face while her eyes bored into his, and for the first time he saw that they were raw and pink. “I should kill you for what you did to him.”

“Did _what_? To _who_?” Lorenz managed, hurt and bafflement coming out in equal measure.

“My Lady.” For the first time, Lorenz’s attention was brought to the company of soldiers attending Hilda and Leonie. They wore heavy armor, with helmets shadowing their expressions from the sun, and Lorenz was struck with the sudden shrivelling of his spine, the kind of feeling that, when he told his mother about, she simply said, _that’s just a rabbit hopping over your grave, darling._

Hilda tossed him back to the ground, and he lay there, assessing his injuries, not even bothering to stem the flow of blood from his nose. Something was very wrong.

“Lord Gloucester,” the man wearing captain’s bars said. “You are under arrest for treason, and the attempted assassination of Duke Claude von Riegan.”

⮘❖⮚

For five days, Lorenz remained jailed in the highest tower of Derdriu’s Leceister prison, a sprawling metropolis of misery made from the original duchal palace, built during the years of the Kingdom’s occupation. In the revolt that followed, it became a gaol, repurposed for Kingdom nobles who had sought to regain control of an increasingly unruly Alliance during the Crescent Moon War, and had not read the writing on the wall. Those that didn’t die of disease had faced the public and the rope. These days, it held most of Derdriu’s local prisoners, and those convicted of serious crimes elsewhere in the Alliance sent to the capital to face justice. It held traitors and thieves, mutineers and murderers.

On the second day of his head throbbing and him being unable to keep food down, Marianne came to visit him. He’d barely been conscious enough to respond to her healing touch, but as the faith magic had cleared his mind and eased his pain, he had reached out to her wrist. When one of the men outside threatened him with a lance, she’d pushed it away.

_“What happened to Claude? No one will tell me.”_

_“I think that’s because everyone thinks you know, Lorenz,”_ Marianne had responded, her voice sounding as miserable as he’d ever heard it.

_“Please tell me.”_

_“He was stabbed. He claims you did it.”_

_“That’s not...Marianne that’s not possible.”_

_“Please don’t make this harder for me.”_ She’d pulled her hand out of his wrist, and moved to leave.

He’d gulped, a deep ache flowing through him. _“If that’s true, why have I not been charged yet?”_

 _“Because they’re waiting to find out if you should be charged with treason, or assassination.”_ She’d made a soft nose, staring down at her hands. _“Hilda doesn’t see the purpose, but Claude wants to speak to you when he’s...well. If he becomes well again.”_

That had been three days ago.

Lorenz was the only prisoner on his floor, and he remained grateful for that even though he still heard the din of commotion from the lower levels, the ones not harboring enemies of the state. His cell was placed across from the main entryway, and well lit by the setting sun, although the temperature dropped as soon as night fell and he was left alone with the breeze washing in off of the sea. He tried to sleep, but the ache in his head threatened to tear him in half like a seam. Marianne’s healing had helped, but it hurt, and fogged his mind in time to his grief.

"I have to hand it to you. You did a real number on me."

Lorenz looked up from his seated position. He saw a familiar yellow jacket, quilted with gold thread and hovering in the shadows outside the door.

"Claude, thank the Goddess. Finally an end to this madness." Lorenz pulled himself to his feet and crossed his cell until he was nearly pressed up to the bars. "What happened? Leonie said you'd been hurt."

Instead of moving closer, Claude remained by the door, his face shrouded from the dim light.

"Aren't you going to let me out?" Lorenz hazarded a smile. "I've had a very long week, Claude."

"You sure have," Claude replied, his voice flat. "Lorenz, drop the act. This is insulting to both of us."

"What _act_?" Lorenz wrapped his fingers around the cold metal. His knuckles instantly ached from the added chill, but he clung to them, because they were rooted to the ground and to the walls and to the ceiling. Because it let him be a little closer to Claude, who stood carefully out of arm's reach. “I was nearly murdered. The people who did it are probably far away by now. I wasn’t even _here_. Why did you tell them I attacked you?"

"I said stop it," Claude commanded as he stepped into the light. A chill went down Lorenz's spine. Normally, Claude could muster a smile even when dealing with his worst enemies. He navigated through the world with an easy grace, and readied letters and daggers alike with the same decent cheer. In recent years, Lorenz saw the cracks in that mask, welcoming both the growth and understanding that came with it.

Now, Claude's face was as flat as a funerary cast—his eyes carefully blank, and his mouth set in a grim line. His brown skin had a sickly gray pallor under the surface. His right arm hung in a sling, and Lorenz just caught a glimpse wrapped bandages showing under the v-line of his tunic.

He'd rarely seen that expression, and had never seen it directed at him.

Lorenz swallowed. "It wasn't me."

"All right, let me humor you. I’ll pretend you hit your head harder than we thought, and you don’t remember. Here’s what happened: I was looking in your eyes when you drove a dagger into my left lung. You stood a foot away from me and laughed while I bled on the ground. Missed my heart, though." Claude listed out Lorenz's crimes with a staccato candor—not angry or hateful, simply emotionless, each word like a nail being driven into a coffin. "Thanks for that. I think I know what you look like."

"It was a trick. Magic. Claude, I would never—"

"If you have any proof of that, now would be the time to show it," Claude replied, voice cutting through Lorenz's with a kind of tense finality. "Because you're the only Lorenz here right now."

Lorenz stood in his cell, mouth agape, as the tumblers of his mind registered his situation, horrors and gears locking into place one after the other. "You don't believe me."

"I didn't think you were stupid enough to try and make ‘I hit my head and don’t remember trying to assassinate you’ work, but I have to commend you on the performance. You should try out as a dancer at the Mittelfrank."

Lorenz recoiled from the bars, his hands shaking as Claude's voice slipped out and around him like a silk noose, gentle and tightening with every word as Lorenz tried to find solid ground to stand on. "Claude—"

"You've said enough," Claude snapped back. "It's my turn. We have laws here, of course, about jury trials and presumption of innocence. Except for one crime."

Lorenz licked his lips, his throat suddenly dry as a desert. "What are you saying?"

"I’m reminding you that those rules do not apply to traitors in war time. In that case, the ultimate decision falls to me."

Lorenz swayed in place as a wave of nausea washed over him. It couldn't be happening. Claude couldn't be talking to him right now, not like this.

"Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, the usual sentence for your crime is death," Claude started, taking a heavy breath. "But, given your unique position, I leave you with two options—"

"Neither," Lorenz said, something raw and hurt and terrified clawing at his insides. "I don't want either one. It _wasn't me_."

"—Option one, you hang. Tomorrow. That one is...pretty straightforward, really. No need to belabor it." Claude said it easily, as coolly as someone might describe any other event, like a battalion change or a shift in responsibilities. "Option two, I commute your sentence to exile. I'm sure Edelgard will be glad to have you back after this. Officially. And I may be able to put off a House Gloucester coup for a little while longer."

Instinctively, Lorenz's hand came up to his throat. When he spoke, his voice sounded undignified and small. "I don't want to die."

He froze in place, and Lorenz caught a flicker of light behind Claude's carefully controlled expression.

"That works out well for both of us, then, since I don't want to watch you die," Claude said. Lorenz heard the undercurrent now, the slipping cadence of rational decision making hiding raw hurt and betrayal. "I'll arrange for your transport from Derdriu to the Adrestian Border. I never want to see you again. Do you understand?"

"I don’t understand any of this. What do you want me to say?" Lorenz gasped, and it turned into more of a sob. "That I will defend my loyalty by dying, or admit my guilt by fleeing? If that’s the game you’re playing, it’s a sick one."

"That's not—"

"That I will prove my _love_ by choosing death before being denied your handsome face? Because I won’t." Lorenz's voice raised to a crescendo, his own anger at his capture, at Claude, washing over the bowl of his heart. He felt the hot sting in his eyes trail down his cheeks; he didn't care.

"I wish I could say I was brave enough to hang for the Alliance. For honor. For you." Lorenz choked out, his chest twisting violently. "But I'm not. Not for something I _didn't do_."

“We all have our burdens... “ Claude shook his head tightly. Had Lorenz ever seen him truly angry? Cold, perhaps, but usually his anger was like mercury—silver, beautiful, and toxic. “Nevermind. What’s done is done.”

Claude turned to leave, and in a panic Lorenz realized he was walking slowly towards the door.

“Nothing has been done yet,” Lorenz said. “If you had any honor, you’d sentence me yourself. I should have made you admit you have doubts, or leave you with my blood on your hands.”

“You already made your choice. Don’t worry about packing. Your property will either be sent to the Empire, or will be liquidated to recompense the Alliance.” At the door, Claude stopped, his shoulders low as he arched his neck around, stared at Lorenz like someone who was too tired to stand up. “I thought you were different Lorenz.”

Lorenz pressed himself into the bars, as if he could follow Claude, as if he could reach him. “Claude. Please don’t leave me here, Claude. Claude!”

This time, Claude did not turn. His hand fell to the iron ring on the door and clapped it twice. Two soldiers standing just outside opened it, and then proceeded to shut it as Claude swept past them. The last glimpse Lorenz caught of his face was not angry, pained, or worried.

It was simply indifferent.

“Claude!” Lorenz yelled, the pounding in his head roaring as he shouted. Tears rolled down his cheeks. This couldn’t be happening. He’d given up everything for Claude, for the Alliance. Because he believed. Surely Claude could believe him back, just this once. Had he not earned that? “Please listen to me!”

But Claude was already down the hall by the time the door slammed shut, and the lock fell finally, fatally into place.

Lorenz sank to the floor of his cell. He gripped the bars until his knuckles blanched around cold steel, and he screamed until his voice cracked.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello there! After a bit of a delay here's a very long chapter two. I am behind on replying to comments but I just wanted to say that I'm really happy about what y'all said about the first chapter.
> 
> A quick note. I reworked some things and instead of 2 chapters, it's now gonna be 4 chapters. So if you're waiting for that Angst With a Happy Ending tag to be fulfilled, it'll be another couple chapters.
> 
> Please note some additional warnings have been added for this chapter. If you want more detail they are:  
> \- Lorenz is still in prison and experiences some suicidal ideation/hopelessness  
> \- Flashbacks to Count Gloucester being manipulative/using some homophobic language  
> \- Description of scarification/mention of past experimentation  
> \- Claude dealing with his injuries from last chapter/mention of sutures

Two Weeks Earlier

The first real sunny day of the spring shone on the sleeping botanical gardens of the duchal palace. Seemingly empty baskets hung on chains between pillars along the long hallway in mimicry of an old Adrestian design, holding perennials that were just beginning to poke through the soil. Evergreen shrubs filled out much of the garden, keeping it green even when Derdriu saw her brief snows.

Claude found Lorenz sitting by the roses with a pair of shears in his hand. He’d been bold enough to wear white breeches, but his boots and gloves were heavier stock than usual, which told Claude he’d also just been for a ride. A small pile of dead or spotted stalks lay next to him, and the lilac sleeves of his long coat were miraculously unsmudged.

All this and more, Claude noticed as he sat down next to Lorenz on the marble bench where he worked.

“You’re hurting those roses,” Claude started, folding his hands in front of him.

The shears snapped shut, removing another rotten bloom. “Nonsense. They’ll be even more beautiful than they were last year, once the weather grows warmer and the sun stops being a layabout.” He glanced up, squinting his eyes against the still-cold sun as a smattering of gray clouds passed overhead. “Which should be soon, if the sea ceases her mockery.”

“That’ll be nice to see.” Claude smiled, folding his hands in front of him. “Even if you won’t be in Derdriu.”

Lorenz paused, the blades hanging half-closed over a sprig with a blackened tip. “I suppose you would already know.” He sighed. “In the interest of hearing it from me, yes. My father has offered my services to the Imperial Army.” He snapped away the rot, leaving a crisp wound on the side of the pulpy stem. “Within the week, I am to return to Gloucester to accept my commission.”

Claude, of course, knew before Lorenz did. He’d seen it coming. Was almost surprised it took the Count this long. The bits of information Lorenz fed him from the new Archduke’s court likely extended the process. Always curious but not too sensitive, and delivered to his desk a month or so before the gossipers tittered. It had been a ploy cooked up between the two of them over wine, but all gambits ran their course.

Lorenz placed the shears next to him and sat back spine straight. “Honor demands I face him myself. However, my plan is to ride back to Gloucester and tell my father that I cannot accept. Neither my duty nor my beliefs would permit it.”

A bowstring snapped somewhere in Claude’s mind, and he turned to see a sly smile pull at the corners of Lorenz’s lips. Lorenz faced him, hands still folded primly in his lap.

A wild sigh blew out of Claude as he ran a hand through his hair. “Lorenz...it’s so nice to hear you say that.”

There was a pause. “...But?”

“But maybe you don’t have to make up your mind yet.”

“You almost sound like you want me to go.” Even Claude caught the little cord of hurt running through Lorenz’s voice.

“I’m not saying that,” Claude said. “I’m just saying...every war turns into a last stand at some point.” He looked around, imagined what it would be like to see the Duchal Palace bathed in smoke from the burning docks.

“Perhaps there’s some truth to that.” Lorenz bent forward, nearly placing a hand next to Claude before seeming to think better of it and drawing it back. “But I’d rather make mine in Derdriu than Enbarr. Or sacrificed in some lunatic charge on Fhirdiad.”

“Your father won’t be happy,” Claude mused.

“His ever-dutiful son refusing a role as a general in the Imperial Army? He’ll still be sputtering with rage when I ride right out the gates.” He shot Claude a vicious smirk, and the confidence in it made something in Claude’s chest hum. “Besides, I’ll bring a battalion with me. There will be no danger, I assure you.”

“I’m a gambler, Lorenz. You don’t have to be.” He wanted to bet on Lorenz, badly, almost as much as another part of him wanted Lorenz to bet on himself. Edelgard needed Gloucester to have a chance at taking Derdriu, and Lorenz was unlikely to be conscripted into any attack on the Alliance. At least for the moment, he’d be safer there. Claude leaned back, propping himself up with his arms as he searched the spotted blue sky above. “The Alliance will need one of us when this is over, whatever’s left of it.”

“Do not talk like that.” Lorenz turned, his knees folding towards Claude as he braced his hands on the cold stone between them. “When I said life would be boring without you, I meant it.”

Claude’s gaze dropped to the gloved hand resting so close to his own. It would be so easy to reach out, move his fingers just a little until they entwined with Lorenz’s. If they were already taking the leap of Lorenz refusing the Empire and his father, then the next thing would feel natural in comparison. They’d orbited around it for months. With Lorenz firmly planted in the Alliance, all of the reasons not to would go away. Those violet eyes widened with thrill and determination and hope.

“The war doesn’t wait.” Claude pulled his hand away. “But I can. I don’t want you to have to trade obligation to your father for obligation to me. You make the best choice for you.”

Lorenz followed him, blinking, and pulled his own hands away, the rough palms of his gardening gloves scratching against the stone. “I see.”

“That being said,” Claude drew out, “you’ll always have a place at my side, if you want to take it. Last stands and all.”

Overhead, a cloud passed over the sun. A handful of chickadees swam low over the rosebush in a darting arc.

“Very well.” Lorenz flashed a grin, somehow daring and full of kindness and conviction, and Claude could almost hear another chip of stone fall off his heart. “I don’t consider this conversation finished, Claude von Riegan. When I return to Derdriu, we will remedy that.”

Claude tried to direct his smile towards the clouds, anything to maybe not give away the anxiety or the dreams singing in his bones.

⮘❖⮚

2 Weeks Later

Claude had never been inside Leicester Prison before.

He’d been outside the towering structure. The first few times were visits to the courtyard, sitting with his grandfather on a raised and shaded dais during the executions of important people. After claiming his duchy, he stood on the rooftops of adjacent buildings and engaged in long conversations with architects about the best ways to improve security and sanitation. In every instance, Claude eventually ended his visits staring up at the high, cut stone walls and pondering the price of failure in the game he’d opted to play.

He still thought he knew what a prison looked like. No one wrote about the way crying echoed around an enclosed space, or how a raw voice grew muffled behind the heft of a shut door.

As soon as he stepped outside, with his back to the guard, Claude wiped some of the burning out of his eyes. Unlike the ache under his ribs, the screaming died down as he made his way down the long, dark hallway, lit only by the last echoes of sunlight as guards and pages slowly made their rounds through the long stairs and corridors. No one could see his face.

Claude emerged into the guard-station in front of the winding staircase on the furthest side of the curved prison structure. Hilda and Marianne waited for him at one of the long tables, illuminated by the oil lanterns at either end. Marianne sat with her back pin-straight and her hands folded over a dense tome. Across from her, Hilda had her face and elbow pressed into the worn wooden surface, her spine curved over in the chair while her nails drummed in sets of four.

As soon as the door shut behind Claude, Hilda’s head shot up. Marianne hesitantly glanced up from her book, and Claude could see her hand shaking as she moved to place her ribbon and close it. “Well?” Hilda kept drumming her nails on the table. “What did he choose?”

There had only been one choice. “Exile.”

“Well, good for him.” Hilda looked like she was trying to stay angry. “Guess he didn’t hit his plush head too hard.”

Marianne’s face remained placid, but her wrists relaxed and dropped as she smoothed over the leather backing under her palm. “What did he say?”

“About what you thought he might.” Claude approached the table, braced himself with his free arm on the end and tried not to look like his stitches could be coming loose. “Said he didn’t know what I was talking about. Acted confused.”

“It may not be an act,” Marianne offered, gently, ignoring the look Hilda shot her.

“That doesn’t take away what he did.” Hilda tossed one of her pink pigtails back over her shoulder and crossed her arms.

“That’s not what I said,” Marianne countered, a little more firmly.

Claude followed the conversation, every word hiding a deeper, longer argument that raged while the healers and physicians hypothesized whether he’d lost too much blood to stay alive or not. Marianne gave him a brief summary after he awoke—Hilda and Judith calling for the swift justice of the Alliance while Marianne, Raphael, and Ignatz had wanted to wait for Claude to wake. Leonie was fiercely neutral, and last they heard Lysithea was still in some far-flung library of the Eastern Church.

On the carriage ride there, Claude thought he wanted Lorenz begging. In his mind, it had been easy to imagine Lorenz on his knees, asking for forgiveness or his life. Or better, holding his head high as Claude wiped that cruel, haughty look off his face by placing mercy firmly off the table. That fantasy felt good in a way that scared Claude, sent tremors of power and vindication through his shoulders, and he hated Lorenz for that as much as he hated him for grinning when he pulled the knife out.

The idea that Lorenz would play a wounded bird never crossed his mind.

Claude’s mother warned him that a loving eye could hide a knife, but some of his siblings taught him that without ever needing to say it. At the same time, neither the whispered strategic guidance of his father nor the political advice that once bled steadily from his grandfather’s polite, narrowed lips prepared him to see Lorenz pretend to _forget_.

Or maybe Marianne was right—maybe Lorenz truly didn’t remember. A traitor wasn’t made in one night, and the idea that Claude had to hold handfuls of hurt for the both of them was possibly the cruelest thing Lorenz had done yet.

“I’m done here,” Claude announced.

“Finally.” Hilda practically danced over to his side. “This place is awful.”

“It is a prison.” Marianne’s voice stayed calm, even as it developed the faintest fragment of sharpened flint. She remained sitting.

When facing towards Claude, Hilda called out. “Mari? Darling, we’re going.”

There was a pause, and they all could have been standing in molasses, so dense and sticky was the silence. “Lorenz received a very bad head injury after falling from his horse. I came to provide more healing, and I mean to do that.”

“He’s not in a great mood.” Claude ran a hand through his hair. “You may want to come back tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Hilda added before turning to Claude. “Hey, did he cry? I bet he cried.”

Claude’s throat fluttered at the memory of Lorenz calling his name, grasping the bars and howling like Claude was taking his whole world away. He hated the dissonance, what it felt like to have seen Lorenz glibly stab him, lived at the receiving end of a very practiced and hidden loathing, and yet feel it in his whole body at the sight of Lorenz desperate, in tears, reaching for Claude like he was there to dangle a lifeline only to rip it away.

“Claude,” Marianne addressed him directly, “I don’t want it to seem like...I have more compassion for him than for you. But I made a promise. With your permission, I would like to stay until I can see him.”

This had been hard on all of them, he knew. Long nights. Bitter debates. They were all coping with this betrayal in different ways. Besides, Marianne tending Lorenz for a bump on the head was nothing compared to her, well, saving Claude’s whole life while he bled out on the floor. “I couldn’t begrudge a healer doing what they feel is right. Stay as long as you need to. I’ll make sure a carriage is sent back to wait.”

Hilda opened her mouth, as if to say something else. A fraction of the gentleness in Marianne’s eyes vanished as she held her ground in a strange game of chicken Claude had never witnessed before and hoped never to again. Without breaking eye contact with Hilda, Marianne opened her book once more.

Hilda pivoted on her heels, then rolled her eyes as Marianne’s attention fell away. “Fine. Come on, Claude. And be careful. I think Judith will have _me_ killed if you tear your stitches.”

As Claude and Hilda descended the stairs, she supported his elbow, helping him on his wounded side as his other arm pressed against the railing. It had been hard getting up there, to the point where Claude questioned the wisdom of whoever put Lorenz in the _highest tower_ , but he wouldn’t accept help from anyone except Hilda or Marianne. As they moved onwards, their steady, careful silence finally grew overwhelming.

“You know,” Claude started, “I really don’t think my heart could take it if you two broke up over this.”

“Marianne is, well, she’s kind. She understands suffering. She wants to be a voice of calm and compassion. ‘ _Hilda, you can’t possibly mean that. He was our friend, too_ ’.” Hilda huffed and pursed her lips together as she navigated the next step. “It’s pissing me off.”

“We’re all dealing with this in different ways.” Claude gritted his teeth together as his heel missed a step, sending a shockwave that, of course, made his sutures groan. “Do you think I’m making a mistake?”

Uncharacteristically, Hilda waited a long time to respond. When she finally did, Claude almost couldn’t look at her, her voice felt so small. Like if he met her eyes he’d glimpse something deeply private.

“Before Marianne and I found you, Lorenz walked right past us covered in blood. Said it was wine. He was _smiling_.” She straightened her back into Marianne’s hand. “When I thought you wouldn’t make it...I was maybe on Judith’s side.”

Claude absently licked his dry lips, only to realize how chapped and split they were. “Do you still feel that way?”

“I still think he should die for what he did.” Hilda turned to face Claude, her fingers squeezing lightly at the bend in his slung elbow. “But I mean like, he should fall into a mill headfirst or something. Not don’t-make-me-say-it. That’s up to you, though.”

They continued down the stairs for some time, finally, mercifully reaching the next floor down. If only Lysithea was around to warp him up.

“Claude?” Hilda prodded, as Claude rested against a wall and tried to act like he wasn’t winded from climbing the stairs. “If you don’t mind me asking, like, why?”

“Why what?”

“Why exile?” She rolled on the backs of her heels. “Like I was saying. It’s up to you, I’m just curious.”

Claude hesitated, as he chewed over whole and half truths. Which of these pills would be the least bitter? Which one left his dignity the most intact?

The first option had been for show, unless he’d arrived to the same wickedness that left him in his keep—if that had happened, Claude wouldn’t consider himself responsible for whatever sentence he laid timber by timber. He’d wanted Lorenz to know he could—that little cruelty he allowed himself, but even the thrill of that victory hollowed out at the storm of despair on Lorenz’s face. Feeling nothing was a better alternative than pity for a man with such a thorough deception.

Claude didn’t want to linger on the irony of that.

Had any of it been real? Was Marianne next with a dose of strychnine in his water? Raphael with rat poison in his biscuits? Did Judith plot a coup that would leave his body on a pike for days, picked at by crows at low tide and seagulls when the water swelled again?

Claude smothered those thoughts in their cribs, one by one. He would not let Lorenz’s own poison cloud his judgement. Paranoia led to madness—the Archbishop, the King of Faerghus, and the Emperor and her Hound were all proof of that.

“I watch Lorenz die on my order, I think about him every day for the rest of my life. He doesn’t deserve that.” Not anymore. Claude liked this fiction, that it was a mercy for himself first and foremost. And it wasn't untrue. “I exile him, he gets to run far away. He can join the Empire or hop on a boat to Morfis.” He breathed in through his nose. “We can go back to the way things were, more or less.”

Hilda, bless her, didn’t call him on that last lie. It wasn’t a very good one. He was tired.

“Now, come on, we only have like fifty more steps and I want to tell everyone the news.”

Hilda groaned. It was nearly normal.

Night fell suffocatingly around Lorenz, and the dark left him sitting in a heap by the cot wishing Claude had offered a third option. Anything. Let him stay in the highest tower as a political hostage. Let him walk off the roof at daybreak. At least that way he could see Derdriu one more time without needing to be jeered at on his way to the gallows or shoved onto a military transport to die in Adrestia. Lorenz was little more than an animal in a chute, bleating and bound for one kind of slaughter or another, all without ever knowing _why_.

Damn Claude for making him choose. Damn himself for lapping hungrily at the fountain of the slim chance exile gave him.

Despite it all, he thought there had to be some mistake. A part of him had, on instinct, been overjoyed to see Claude’s face. He’d wanted to put everything on the line for the Alliance. For that face, that voice, that _mind_. Now it had all gone to Hell, and he’d likely follow soon. At the School of Sorcery in Fhirdiad, Lorenz found himself party to many of the Kingdom’s strange—dare he say it, pagan—beliefs about the restless dead and the flames they wandered. He believed it now. His heart burned already, and the morality plays of Arianrhod said the rest of him was doomed to follow. Histories would try him for treason, and he would judge himself for being so foolish.

“ _I see what this is about_ ,” his father had said, looming over the fireplace in his study, a glass swirling ice in his hand. “ _When did the young Duke win your favor_?”

“ _I don’t have to answer that_.” Lorenz remembered the angry heat in his cheeks and on the tips of his ears.

“ _I’ll suffer a dandy for a son but not a coward_.” Count Gloucester had spat on the floor like he’d picked grape seed out of his teeth. “ _Call it what it is_.”

Lorenz shook his head, the room suddenly feeling unbearably warm. “ _The Alliance_ —”

“ _This isn’t about the Alliance._ ” His father violently disarmed him with a look over his shoulder. “ _All your life you’ve done as I said. I don’t see why you would strive for independence now, least of all for the argumentative squibbling of our fellow unruly lords. If it’s about a man, I can find you men._ ”

“ _I don’t know what you’re talking about_.” Lorenz pinned his lips shut.

“ _I know. I’ve always known_.” His father said with something worse than disgust or anger on his tongue—exasperation, boredom. “ _Everything I’ve done is to keep you from throwing your life away_. _Has he claimed he loves you back_? _Well, this is politics, and I promise you he loves his own head more than yours_.” The slightest shift to his posture was as good as a violent dismissal. “ _Do what you like. I clearly can’t stop you._ ”

In the deathly quiet of his cell, Lorenz buried his face further in his arms, pulled his knees closer. Like a child.

What had Claude seen in the highest room of the palace? What kind of illusion could replicate someone, or fool a prince’s mind so completely that he would turn on someone who had just damned a noble name for loyalty?

Lorenz, of course, had to consider the worst possibility—that it was not true. That Claude merely aimed to be rid of him. The men that intercepted him on the trail could easily have been Claude’s. An elaborate scheme—and a deeply cruel one—that if asked Lorenz would have thought was beyond Claude, even if there had been any tangible strategic benefit to it.

However, that was not a truth that his heart could take.

Claude had not stood across from him like the gleeful victor in a long game of chess. There had been no joy—nary the smile of a player who had just taken a knight by leaving his rook exposed. Something terrible had happened to him, and the dead hurt in his eyes made Lorenz question his own hands.

His memorial was broken by the sound of the door unlocking. He looked up, hating how undignified and swollen his eyes felt. He expertly tried to wipe some of the wetness away on his damp sleeve.

He thought it might be Claude, come in horror to ask for forgiveness. Or the executioner coming to gloat as part of a last and bitter betrayal.

Instead, Marianne came through the door. A guard flanked her, and illuminated a torch behind her shoulder. She paused, face fallen further than his own honor.

“I came to check on your injuries,” Marianne said, her hands folded on the heavy book in her hands.

Lorenz sniffed and tried to hide it behind his wrist. “I can’t imagine why that matters.”

“It matters to me.” She approached the bars, placed her book on a low chair to the side of the room. She knelt down, not minding the way her skirts pillowed up around her knees on the filthy floor. “You chose exile. Surely that means my healing isn’t wasted.”

He shook his head. “It could mean anything. My reality seems to be different from Claude’s, and my life will be forfeit as well the second I cross the border.”

“I can’t guess at what you’re feeling, but Claude always says that as long as you’re alive, you’ve won.” Marianne spoke cautiously. “I don’t know if I believe that either, but it’s a nice thought.” A beat. “I have another nice thought for you, if you want it.”

“What would that be?”

“That the Goddess knows the truth.” Marianne flattened a wrinkle near her knee.

“I don’t even think I know the truth.” He planted the back of his skull—still radiating with pain—firmly on the stone behind him. “Some...would perhaps not appreciate that, Marianne. But I do. You are gracious beyond what I deserve.”

That platitude did him no good, aside from give him a moment of calm in the storm of his mind. The Goddess. The one who the priests said watched Fodlan from beyond the stars waiting for the day when humanity was worthy of her salvation and she could again drown their mountains in columns of light. She wouldn’t arrive in time to save him, and although he’d heard the sermons and songs, he had his doubts her return would come at all.

“How is your head?”

“It’s better,” he lied. He’d cried it into a fury and the place that had been struck throbbed in time to his pulse.

“I would still like to heal it one more time.” Marianne moved closer to the bars.

Bold of her to do that, when they all believed him a viper.

“Afterwards,” she continued. “I had planned to pray with you. If you’ll have it.”

He swiped at his cheeks with his soaked sleeve again.

Marianne had always been kinder to him than she was to herself, despite his ungraceful prying and prodding. He was lucky he hadn’t ruined their friendship in its youth, not the least because she brightened his cell now. Still, he would rather she care for Belladonna than him. Perhaps he could ask her to, since he would likely be in Adrestia and under the next spring’s flowers long before—

Lorenz opened his eyes.

“Marianne,” he broached. “Where is my horse?”

Her brows knitted a fraction, and the hand over her knee stilled. “She threw you in the woods, did she not? She’s likely still there.”

Lorenz tried not to dwell on the sadness in her voice, or how it mirrored his own. “No, I’m not being clear. I have been told I arrived in Derdriu a full day before I was brought back in chains—”

At that, her mouth flickered back into a frown.

“I had to have been riding a horse? But not Belladonna, because she was with me. Easily thirty miles away.” He queried, a kind of fury building up in him. “Surely you’ve been to the stables and can see she is not there. What steed could I have brought from Gloucester if not her?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Belladonna wouldn’t have been in the stables because you would have left on her. Lorenz, please do not mistake my pain at seeing you like this for a willingness to conspire. I believe that you don’t remember, but Hilda and I _saw_ you.” Her hands squeezed her skirts into fists, and for the first time angry tension clenched her hands. “I couldn’t bear the thought of you dying after we nearly lost Claude, no matter what you did. But I’m not...I’m not calling him a liar.”

“You wouldn’t be,” he said, managing an undignified scramble over towards the bars. He paused in front of her, his hands reaching out in a facsimile of how he’d tried to pry them apart to reach Claude as he walked away. “I’m merely asking you to look in the stables, next time you’re there. Please, for me?” He paused. “And next time you’re out riding Dorte on the main road from Derdriu please look for Belladonna. If not for my sake, because she’s a creature of the Goddess.”

“I was already going to look for her.” She fidgeted. “You have my word, Lorenz. For all that it’s worth.”

“It’s worth all the world to me, Marianne, and it always has been.” This time tears stung his eyes, flowed down his cheeks even though he thought he hadn’t any more to cry.

Her pale fingers, scarred gray by faith, lifted to his clenched knuckles, where he’d gripped the bars until they were stiff. A gentle healing flooded them with heat under her palm, easing away the soreness in his tendons and joints, letting them know that they could relax a moment. Lorenz relaxed with them, the tension bleeding away from his spine.

Daringly, she stretched an arm through the bars until her hand rested on his temple, her fingers nesting in his hair. Lorenz closed his eyes. He’d wanted nothing more than for Claude to reach for him like that. When the faith turned her hand nearly uncomfortably hot, the rawness of the worst spot on his head ceased. The relief was like drinking from a cool spring after a hard day’s march.

In a moment of weakness, he reached up to hold her palm in place for just a moment longer only for the hand there to pull back. Not quite a startled movement. Instead, he felt the practiced caution of someone who worked with wild and scared animals. As if he were pitiable in his rehabilitation and liable to bite at any moment. He’d cherish that healing touch—he didn’t know when or if he would see her again, or the next time someone might be gentle with him—but mourned being so reduced in her esteem.

“Do you want to pray?” she asked.

He swallowed. Unsure how to tell her that prayer never came naturally to him and provided little comfort on its own. His presence in the church was for show and to be seen socializing outside.

Yet now he thought of the cathedral in Derdriu where he’d spent time pondering those at his sides who performed faith yet pursued only selfish ends. He questioned under walls that stood strong around him, because he only needed to be seen there. His thoughts could be his own, echoing in his ears up to the high ceiling.

An idea formed in his skull as he drowned, reaching for threads, he found one. A little spot of hope. Something Claude couldn’t possibly refuse him. Something that would put off his exile by at least a couple hours.

“Please know how much it means to me that you would offer, yet I fear I can’t find it in myself to pray here.” He licked his lips, anxiously knitted his hands together. If Marianne refused him, he didn’t know who else could carry his message like one of Sothis’s own saints. “I know I do not have the right to ask more of you. However...if you could pass along to Claude my desire to visit the church here in Derdriu one last time before my departure, I would be very grateful.” 

“I understand, and I will tell him.” Marianne reached for her book and rose to her feet. “Please know that I had planned to keep you company as long as you may need it, but under the circumstances I should probably return to the palace.” She looked out the window. “It’s about to rain.”

He knew what that meant. Had he been sentenced to death, she was ready to spend the night sitting with him. His exile’s heart was touched all the same. “I would not want to shroud your grace with this gaol any more than I already have.”

As she left, a chill took her place, leaving his cell even colder than he’d felt previously. Outside the barred window, the stars that kept him company his first several nights were obscured by billowing, angry clouds that must have rolled in off the sea. He hadn’t weathered a rain in the tower yet.

Lorenz pulled his dampened, worn—utterly wrecked—tunic tighter around his shoulders and curled up on the cot.

Before leaving for Leicester Prison, Claude wedged a toothpick into the hinge of his study door. Upon his return, it laid on the wood floor a couple inches away from where it had fallen. He noticed that with his hand frozen at the furthest turn of the doorknob. He cracked the aged wood open in it’s frame, checked the corners for any glint of shadow or wire, whistled, and clasped the hilt of the dagger he kept under the wrap of his sash. The familiar leather welcomed him, even though he hadn’t been wearing it the night he needed it most. Not a mistake he’d make again.

Curiously, a gentle light poured out of the crack when he opened it further. Claude sighed, his grip relaxing on his dagger as he stepped through into his study.

A crystal magelight on the desk glowed a soft mint green. In the light, the far windows turned into obsidian sheets, broken only by the shining droplets of rain snaking their way down to the sill. His desk sat like a monolith under the glow, hosting a single, unsigned writ. Everything was his grandfather’s except the pen sitting next to the bloody inkwell. That had been a gift. “ _For the next time you want to try your hand at poetry._ ”

Sleeping on the same futon he’d spent the previous night on, a wave of white hair fell off the side of the cushion, its owner breathing in steady sleep.

Claude smiled, and approached the futon. “Hey, you’re in my bed.”

Lysithea blinked awake, taking in her surroundings before rounding her attention up to Claude. Instantly, she rose to a seated position, wiping at her eyes. “I started warping from the archives as soon as I heard.”

“You missed all the excitement.” He smiled. Lysithea had been away, researching in the Eastern Church’s libraries. With a little help from a seal of Alliance authority and a sweet-talking letter, she’d been granted two weeks of unrestricted access. The seal was Claude’s. The letter was Lorenz’s. At the time, Claude patted himself on the back at their cleverness, at what a great team they were. Now he wondered if Lorenz had just wanted Lysithea away for when he made his move. “It’s good to see you, Lysithea.”

She rose to her feet, hands brushing down the front of her robes and wiping her face. “I must have fallen asleep.” She glanced at the futon. “What do you mean your bed?” 

Claude’s smile flickered a fraction. Did he want to admit he didn’t want to go back to the room he’d spent the last few days trying not to die in? “Oh, you know me. Hard at work. Can’t let a little kitchen knife slow me down.”

She scowled. “That’s how I know you’re feeling better. You’re treating me like a kid.”

“Hey now.” He waved a hand. “I’ve had a pretty bad week, you know.”

“I heard.” She walked over to the window, her hands folded tightly behind her. “There’s...something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“That depends on what it is.” Striding across the room, Claude claimed his seat at the desk. He managed not to groan with the old chair when he sat down and his healing wound screamed at him.

“Did Lorenz seem...different?”

A bolt shot through Claude’s stomach, to the point where he almost asked her to leave right then and there. “Sure seemed the same. Right up until he stabbed me.”

Her nose twitched. “What have you read about the folklore of Fodlan? Particularly Hrym territory?”

He shook his head. “A little. Not much.”

“In Hrym, we have...stories. About travellers wandering off into the woods, following lights.” She went onwards as the rain pattered down. “Sometimes, people come back different. Some of our stories say they were possessed.” The fingers of one hand managed a steady, anxious drum against the other. “Others say that they were _replaced_. With changelings. Doubles. Whatever you want to call them.”

“You think,” he thought about each word before he dropped it, so as not to sound too incredulous, “that the person who stabbed me was not Lorenz?”

“I’m just saying it’s strange. Everyone could see how much he—”

“I wagered my life on trusting him once.” Steel scraped against bone in his voice. “I almost lost. I’m not going to do it again without evidence I trust more than my own eyes.”

Lysithea stood with her back to him, arms crossed as she gazed out the window. “Maybe you don’t have to.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’ll need you to explain.”

She whirled around to face him, eyes bright, the way a rabbit looked as it sprinted down a trail. “Why are you alive?”

“Wow, rude.” Claude tapped the pen against his thumb. “Because Hilda and Marianne found me.”

“Raphael said Hilda and Marianne saw Lorenz leaving the keep,” Lysithea continued, the wheel of her brain spinning off in a direction he couldn’t yet follow. “Why did he leave you if you weren’t dead yet? Why saunter out in full view of everyone instead of just warping to the stables?”

Claude’s mouth narrowed. “He said he couldn’t decide if it would be more fun if I lived or died.”

“Does that sound like an assassination to you?” Lysithea approached his desk, planted her arm firmly on the aged redwood. “What kind of assassin leaves their target alive?”

Claude’s tongue worked at an age-old chip in a lower canine tooth. “He’s not an assassin. He’s a nobleman’s son trying to start a coup he cooked up with his old man back home.”

In his most gracious thoughts, Claude wanted to think that was it. That Lorenz had been threatened by the count. That there was something—some punishment, some unconscionable blackmail that forced him to do what he’d done. That the hate had been an act; that it had just been business or survival. Claude could at least understand that.

Though understanding was no balm. Lorenz did not succeed in killing him, but there was no indication he’d done anything to make sure he lived, no kindness to soften the blow and implied the phantom kiss they’d danced around for months had ever been meant. Even a blandness, a calm, ‘This is just politics’ would have been welcomed.

“What if Lorenz was the target?”

Claude whiplashed out of his reverie, thinking he didn’t hear Lysithea correctly. “Pardon?”

Lysithea spoke more deliberately. “What if Lorenz was the target?”

“You’re forgetting the part where I _watched him stab me_.” He twirled the pen again. “It’s not a frame job if you committed the crime you’re accused of.”

“The changelings—”

“Lysithea, I need more than folk tales,” he pressed two fingers to his temple. “I _know_ this is hard to accept—”

“What about this?” She stepped in front of him, one small hand going to her wide, white sleeve and pulling it up. The magelit crystal grew brighter, flaring green against the study and making Claude squint his eyes as they settled on the lines of her forearm. “Is this more than folk tales?”

Lysithea’s skin was always pale, and he could see the faint, inky tinge of reason corruption working its way from her fingertips to the base of her wrist. Starting from the crook of her elbow was something else—a line of interlocking scars in straight lines. He’d have thought they were marks from a wayward thunder spell, if not for the sharp corners at each branching pathway, or the perfectly circular spots where they ended or radiated from in a labyrinth of tissue. He tried to follow them, reached out to feel the raised areas before thinking better, and before he could see they weren’t cuts or burns—they’d been raised from under the skin, as if something crawled mechanically through the dermis.

“When I was young, House Ordelia was involved in a revolt against the Empire.” She started speaking through a shaking breath, forced steady, made big when it wanted to stay small. “As punishment, many of our family heads, officers, and officials were killed. But there was...more. Mages in black appeared, claiming to be from Enbarr. I don’t think they were from the empire though. Never once did I see one of their faces.” She ran a finger along the densest mark, a nasty thoroughfare with a dozen offshoots. “They gathered up the children and performed a series of experiments. Blood. Organs. Bone.” She shuddered. “I was the only survivor among the children of House Ordelia.”

“...You?” Claude steadied the heat in his chest, the bursts of pain and anger as she told her story. Who could have done this to her? To other children?

“This. This is why I don’t think the changelings in Hrym are _just a story_. I’ve met monsters. I know they’re real, I just don’t know what they look like.” She took another steadying breath. “You know as well as anyone that something is rotten in Fodlan. And it goes deeper than the Church or even the Empire.”

Claude closed his eyes, indulging a moment of...something. Of remembrance for children he never got to meet as adults. Never got to hear Lysithea talk about. For the friend at his side who followed him to ruin with all the rest but one...

“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m chasing ghosts. Half the crested nobles in Fodlan are, after all.” She took a deep breath. “But if you believe anything I’ve said. If there’s any connection...”

“...then this could be your only chance,” Claude finished, using his eyes to trace the rigid gridwork of scarring that branded her arm. “I won’t…lift my sentence, but I’ll see if I can come up with something. But if we don’t find anything, Lysithea, we _have_ to accept that Lorenz made a choice. I will not allow the rest of us to fall apart over this, do you understand? If we fail now, so will the Alliance.”

Lysithea inclined her head. “I understand. Thank you.” She swallowed. “I’m…”

“Hey, if you want to thank me, stop right there and go on to bed without finishing that sentence.” He smiled.

The corner of her mouth stuck out, almost in a pout. “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping much, but take care of yourself, okay?”

He offered a weak salute as she exited the door to his study. As she left, the magelight faded, and he needed to let his sight adjust to the gloom, to the faint light coming in from outside as the rain poured down.

His hand fell to the writ on his desk, to the inkwell he stabbed with the metal nib. There was an irony to it—sending Lorenz to exile with the pen Claude got from him. Still, he paused, the tip of the nib leaving a drop on the corner.

His heart was in too much pain for him to be numb to her request. There was something endlessly appealing to him in what she was suggesting. Evil mages. Shape changers. Fairy-tale wickedness that would be righted in the end—unless it was a Faerghan story, of course, then someone usually ended up dancing to death in hot iron shoes.

Unbidden, his mind took him back to the prison, churning, looking at impossible what ifs.

But Claude couldn’t do that again. Couldn’t indulge the side of him that wanted to believe that the Lorenz he’d seen in prison and the Lorenz he brought up to his keep were two different men.

Lorenz was a traitor.

Claude’s hand ran along the edges of his desk in thought, an old habit from when he wondered if there were any crafty compartments, any hidden containers or secret messages from his grandfather that might help him diffuse the powder keg that was Fodlan. Gloucester was always a word not far from his grandfather’s mouth, along with the bloody spots left in his handkerchiefs.

Claude leaned back in his chair. His eyes flickered to the window.

He knew Lorenz was guilty, but how did one go about catching a mirage or testing the existence of a ghost? The thought experiment was _interesting_ , if nothing else. He had everything he needed.

Closure and peace of mind for himself? A favor to Lysithea? All at no real risk.

Claude von Riegan didn’t mind those odds.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! Chapter 3 is here. Thank you to everyone who has commented so far. This is one of my fave stories to be working on right now + I love Claurenz and am real happy to be adding to the tag.
> 
> A couple quick notes for the story as a whole:  
> \- It will now be 5 chapters. I'm sorry! This is the last time I'll need to bump it up. I Promise.  
> \- I very minorly altered a line in a previous chapter. Originally Claude said a hypothetical execution would take place "at dusk" but it was just hella messing with the timeline for the chapter, so I removed that constraint.
> 
> A couple quick/hyper specific warnings for this chapter:  
> \- Lorenz has some disordered eating/there's a mention of nausea but it stops there.  
> \- There's some fairly intense pondering of mortality.
> 
> Also all horses are fine!
> 
> Immense and multiple "thank you"(s) as always to Goop, Nuanta, and Ink! Y'all have really been the best as I work my way through this story.

The day after visiting Lorenz, Marianne went for a ride.

Sometimes when her own mood was unbearable she couldn’t manage it, but if she was able to change into proper clothes, make the trek down to the stable, and throw Dorte’s saddle on, it at least cleared her head for a little while. She didn’t need to worry about her own legs, only where his might go, and she didn’t need to think like a person, only turn her mind to what could frighten him.

When Marianne went to the stable to tack up Dorte, she'd gone looking for a horse in the stables with the Gloucester brand. After some searching, at the far end, she'd found a charcoal roan with a familiar rose pattern. The brand was long-healed, with the hairs growing white over an old scar—nothing someone had smudged or forged at the last minute.

The spring usually brought her a clearer mind, but she’d returned to the suite she shared with Hilda to find her asleep on the couch—decidedly not in their bedroom—and although Marianne did her best to squeeze the sin of anger from her bones, she was sure the new, hot anguish in her chest was some ghost of that. Hilda had left by the time Marianne woke for her morning prayers, and she tried to turn her thoughts from how utterly stubborn Hilda could be.

It felt like a series of impossible accidents that she’d been there at all—that she and Hilda were together that night, that they’d gone back to Hilda’s old room instead of their own, that they’d all returned to Derdriu, or that Marianne was even alive after her darkest teenage melancholies. But every piece fell into place, and Marianne was with Hilda when the two of them discovered Claude too far gone for any vulnerary or concoction. Marianne had been able to hold her hand to his wound and give him enough life for help to arrive, and she would be forever grateful for that.

She’d stayed by his bedside, discussing each progression with the palace healers and debating firmly with the physicians and their instruments. Claude named Lorenz as his attacker the first time he swam up to consciousness, and that was that. Seven people heard it, and she wasn’t able to stop Hilda from marching off with the intent of doing some bloodletting of her own, even as Marianne threw out the physician that suggested leeches might help.

She wanted to turn her thoughts to thankfulness—glad that Claude had returned to them, glad that she wasn’t whispering psalms in the prison tower at that very moment.

But as relieved as she was to not be bidding her friends farewell in dark-lacquered boxes, seeing both of them _broken_ was a different burden. Something still felt _wrong_. Wrong enough that it needled her hands as she knit them together, and she couldn not turn her mind to peace.

She had a meeting with Claude soon and needed her words to be sure. The situation was so delicate; a misplaced doubt, a raised voice, and she could see it all shattering.

So she finished her prayers, changed to her riding clothes, and went to the stable.

She followed the main road out of Derdriu, across the raised bridge, over the narrow channel linking it to solid ground. The tide was low enough that if she’d wanted to, she could have ridden along the narrow, sandy shoreline, but there was little traffic at the main gate anyway.

Marianne directed Dorte through the first copse of trees along the main road, but instead of following the thoroughfare she made a left onto an old supply route. As she took the less travelled path, she considered _what_ felt wrong.

She didn’t think Claude was lying. She trusted him as much as she trusted that the wound in his front had nearly been fatal, and she’d heard the genuine pain in his voice. It was more molasses-dense _emotion_ than she’d ever heard from Claude, and more than she ever expected to hear again. It was nearly unbearably sad and frightful, but there was no _mystery_ to it.

What sickened her now was that she didn’t think Lorenz was lying either, neither from omission nor amnesia.

Marianne didn’t know what that could mean.

So lost in thought was Marianne that she nearly missed it when Dorte’s ears went up.

She drew him to a stop. All around them, the forest was as alive as the road was still. Larger animals were likely sleeping away from the high sun, but she strained her ears to listen for the high wail of an injured rabbit, or the helpless shriek of a mother bird who had lost a baby from her nest.

“Do you hear something, Dorte?” she asked, expecting no response, not really, but it brought a hint of calm as she grew uneasy, shifting her gloved hands on the leather reins in her hand.

Dorte snorted, and when he was quiet again, over the sound of his heavy breathing, she heard hoofbeats. They were sporadic, not coming closer and not falling in any consistent rhythm, and they were not accompanied by the telltale sound of bells to warn foot traffic of an approaching rider.

Marianne urged Dorte forward. He didn’t need much encouragement—his head was inadvisably high with curiosity, and his nose flared uncertainly as they went forward. Not wanting to scare whatever lay around the bend, Marianne had to firmly hold her elbows in place to keep him from going up into a trot.

As she rounded the bend, the hoofbeats grew louder, and Dorte almost spotted the dark shape darting along the treeline before Marianne did. She nearly blinked in disbelief, as if she might be party to some vision, but she knew as soon as she saw the mud, lather, and blood from numerous cuts and scrapes drying together large patches of grayish-brown horsehair. The animal saw her, wide-eyed, and gave a playful buck at the edge of the road, and Marianne had to hold back Dorte because he recognized that miraculous mare.

Mouth wide and blinking away tears, because it was _impossible_ , Marianne reached for the spare halter she had in her saddlebags.

She went to go collect Belladonna.

⮘❖⮚

Claude sat at his desk, absently twirling his fancy pen in his right hand. He didn't like the feeling in his gut. It started as a bad morning, because it turned out the couch in his study wasn't meant to be slept in, and because he'd woken from a wretched dream he couldn't quite remember. He'd always been a light sleeper, but he didn't appreciate the feeling of being _pursued_ behind his closed eyes, running from shapes that followed formlessly in time to the throb in his chest.

If he were an enemy agent who had failed a mission, what would he be scrambling to do?

Marianne sat on the couch opposite Lysithea. Her hands folded over the knees of her neat riding breeches while Lysithea sat with one hand to her chin, eyes practically burning holes in the floor. Leonie, who remained chronically athletic even in a time of crisis, leaned against the sturdy panelled windows with her arms crossed.

In one hand, Leonie held the ceramic chip Lysithea gave her, and her brow furrowed as she studied it. It was about the size of a coin, thin, and easily breakable in a clenched fist. Earlier that day, Lysithea hastily etched matching sigils onto that one and a similar castoff that she held in her own hand. Experimentally, Leonie pressed a nail into the thin grooves, and Claude couldn't help but cringe at the sound.

"Hey," he said. "Take it easy. That needs to work."

Leonie looked between Lysithea and Claude, a studious, vaguely skeptical look on her face. "I'm going to need you to take me through this one more time."

He'd expected some resistance, and he avoided the look Marianne was trying not to give him in the interest of diffusing even the appearance of any tension in the room. When she'd come to him to pass along Lorenz's request to visit the church before being escorted to the border, she likely hadn't expected Claude to say yes quite so enthusiastically.

Claude leaned back in his chair. "You've gathered ten good soldiers?"

"People that I know," she said. "Just like you asked."

"You'll have six with you, and station the other four in the building across the street." Claude ran the nail of his thumb over his lip as he spoke. "Lysithea and I will be out of sight but within warp range."

“Please,” Marianne said, “do not tear your stitches.”

Lysithea gestured to the chip in her own hand. "If you see anything out of the ordinary with the people you're bringing with you—anything at all—crush that sigil and this one will break too. That's how we'll know something is wrong."

"The chapel will be mostly empty, so Lorenz can have it to himself." Claude tried to keep his mind on track, tried not to think about Lorenz wandering around a house of his Goddess looking the same way he had the previous night, tear stained and with a ruined shirt. "Order your men to stay away. If he isn't doing anything and anyone tries to get close to him, send us the signal and do your best to apprehend them."

From her end of the couch, Marianne squeezed her eyes shut. "Claude…"

He pressed a hand to the bridge of his nose. Two horses made bad math, even for a would-be assassin—Claude acknowledged that. "We've been over this."

"You are endangering your prisoner in a house of the Goddess," Marianne said. "It does not sit well with me."

"For him to be in any danger, ghosts would have to be real."

"This isn't what I _meant_." Lysithea's eyes were wide, her voice holding the faintest trace of an accusation. She faced Marianne. "You’re right. I think there is a risk. But it also may be the only way to prove Lorenz's innocence."

"Or prove the existence of ghosts." The pen stopped twirling in Claude's hands. He was doing this as a favor to her; he didn't want to give the others false hope, and he had no desire for it himself.

Leonie stayed mostly quiet both times Claude and Lysithea ran through the plan. Claude watched her carefully. He expected a little skepticism, expected questions. She didn't like going into a situation blind, and she'd told him as such earlier.

With her mouth in a tight line, she looked—not accusing, merely curiously—in Claude's direction."You think I don't recognize a hunt when I see one?"

Leonie held the chip firmly between her thumb and forefinger, but her attention locked firmly on to Claude.

"Once, in my village, when I was a child, we had a harsh winter. Tracks from a large wolf began showing up all over town. First livestock started going missing, then people. The old men kept saying it was a once-in-a-generation killer. A maneater. Real scary for a kid, yeah?" She visibly suppressed a tremor. "That year, a few of the adults volunteered to dress as warm as they could and drive sheep into a narrow ravine. They waited for hours."

She pocketed the chip. "What are we trapping?"

⮘❖⮚

Three died that day.

Lorenz didn’t have a perfect line of sight from where his cell was, but if he stood on his cot he had a fine view of the main road leading away from the prison tower and courtyard. Most days he only spied the traffic that one would expect. Common people passing by on foot. Carts pulled by large horses arrived with bags of staple grains stacked on the flat bed, and Lorenz took some joy in seeing even those simple beasts come and go. Sometimes a carriage arrived from down the rough hewn streets, most likely full of visitors there to see the prison’s better-off inhabitants.

But that morning the air still smelled like the rain from the night before, and a steady stream of people took a right towards the courtyard instead. And Lorenz watched with morbid fascination, shredding a loose thread in between his fingers while he gripped the barred window tightly with his left hand and his heart began running in time to a clattering drumbeat. He heard none of the actual goings on—he was too far away and too high up—but the loud cheer around midmorning told him all he needed to know. He didn’t need to stay and watch the horse drawn buckboard roll back onto the main street, this time stacked with three narrow pine boxes.

He kept his eyes on the road, watching the coffins borne slowly away down half the length of Derdriu.

Behind him, the door opened with the sound of a guard coming in with his lunch. The door shut and any second, a metal plate would screech into place next to the breakfast he hadn’t touched, like it had every day.

“Pay me no mind,” Lorenz said, more into the window than the room. The guards never responded. “Merely considering how I missed my transport.”

“You don’t have to watch, you know.”

Lorenz’s eyes widened, and instead of one of the grizzled, uniformed guards that had been his nearest human contact for days, he saw Leonie sitting cautiously outside his cell, one hand hovering over the satchell at her waist. “Leonie!”

“Hi, Lorenz,” she said casually, as if everything hadn’t changed. Her attention dropped to his cold breakfast. “Before you say anything else, I brought you something. Raf said he didn’t think you’d be eating.”

Lorenz nearly burst into tears when she produced a parchment wrapping from her satchell. His stomach, twisted and ill, urged itself into a kind of hungry nausea as soon as he saw she was holding a sandwich. It was simple, with hard, flat bread, sagging lettuce, and meat that likely came from the rations, and it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“Forgive me, I had no interest in food earlier.” He slid down off of his cot, scrambling as gracefully as a man could towards a meal served to him between the bars of his cell. “How on earth did you get this in here?”

She sat across from him, arms resting on one bent knee. “Guards were a bit...distracted this morning.”

“I see,” he said, pausing only slightly before gathering up the gift she’d brought him. The bread wasn’t fresh, and he would have balked at the salty meat before everything happened. He wasn’t known for eating ravenously, but he devoured bite after bite before he knew if his stomach would accept it or not. Despite the doubt, the taste made his eyes water further. Queasily, gladly, he rested his head between the bars.

Leonie passed him a wooden cup with water in it, which he used to chase the dry bread and some of the threat subsided. “Thank you, Leonie. I have not—I have been _eating_ you see, but…”

“Say no more,” she said, gloved fingers drumming against her makeshift half-chaps. “Thought you might want something before we leave for Myrddin.”

Lorenz shuddered in place, as if an arrow had been driven into his unhappy stomach. “Myrddin?”

“I volunteered to take you there. With an armed guard, of course, so please don’t try to escape.” She shrugged, but that was all too blithe a word for the look on her face. “Figured it was better me than Judith, or some old soldier that was loyal to the former Duke.” Leonie bit her lip, still looking at everything in the room except him. “We’ll be stopping at the chapel first.”

Lorenz grasped a bar, as if he could pull himself closer. “We will?”

She nodded. “Marianne asked, and Claude gave his permission. We’ll be going after last prayers today, when it’ll be pretty much empty. You’ll have an hour.” A beat. “Please don’t—”

“Try to escape. I won’t. My situation is...what it is. I’d not seek to drag anyone down with me, least of all you.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “It is a comfort that you’ll be there.”

“There’s more.” For the first time, he saw a hint of a genuine smile on Leonie’s face. “Marianne found Belladonna this morning.”

Lorenz sank into place, as the first real relief he’d felt in days slipped violently from his skull down to his folded knees. “Bless her. Bless Marianne von Edmund.” He tried to meet Leonie’s eyes. “Truly? Please tell me she truly found her. And that she’s all right? Please.”

With a small smile, Leonie touched his hand with hers. “Relax, Lorenz. She’s fine. Marianne found her while riding a side road. A smidge muddy and scraped up from being in the woods, but none the worse for wear. Saw with my own eyes.”

“She is a wonderful creature.” Lorenz didn’t want to cry in front of her, but he did wipe something wet from his cheek when he thought of Belladonna alone and scared in the forest. A trained warhorse through and through, avoiding dangers and predators all to come back to her post. _Good horse_. He sniffed.

“I recognize I will likely not be permitted to bring her with me.” He wasn’t even sure he wanted to bring her into such uncertainty. “Marianne has Dorte but if you would like to care for Belladonna in my stead, it would brighten a grim future.”

“Me?” Leonie sounded incredulous. “You can’t be serious. I could never repay you.”

His eyes rolled up to her from between the bars. Did he tell her that it doubtlessly wouldn’t matter soon? Death in Derdriu or death in Adrestia, it was the same bargain he’d made when he refused the Empire’s call. “Like you said earlier. Better you than some ancient cavalryman planning to retire after the next war.”

She smiled, the first real smile he’d seen from her since she arrived. Afterwards, her mouth tightened, narrowed and she cupped her forehead with one of her gloves. “Lorenz, I have to know: is it true? Did you really do what Claude says you did?”

Lorenz couldn’t refrain from a short, bitter laugh. “Would it matter what I have to say? Claude’s judgement is passed, and you’ll be taking me to Myrddin no matter what your personal feelings may be.”

“That’s true.” Her voice sounded hoarse and tight. “I had no idea what to think. I don’t want to brag, but I know you’ve never seen me freeze in battle. Not once. When the Deer were arguing, I was totally silent. Like a statue. And about as useful.” She dragged a hand down her face from where it had shielded her eyes, and Lorenz would pretend he didn’t see the pink on her lightly tanned skin. “Claude’s my commander and my friend. But you’re my friend, too. I want to hear it from you, on your noble honor—on your _crest_ —did you try to kill Claude?”

“No,” he said, clutching at the bars. Even as the word left his mouth, he prayed it wasn’t a lie, hoped his mind hadn’t dipped to betrayal the way Claude thought Lorenz had. “No, I didn’t. It wasn’t me, Leonie.”

She looked up to the ceiling, wretchedly scrunching up her face as she wrapped her wrists around her knees. “I was afraid you might say that.” She let out a breath. “I want to believe you.”

“Then believe me,” he said, and tried to smother the shame he felt at how desperate he sounded.

“Can you think of anything—anything, even if it doesn’t seem important—that might help clear your name?” She asked.

“Nothing I haven’t already told you, Marianne, or the men who questioned me.” He brushed his bangs back. “My battalion—”

She shook her head. “We sent people to look at the part of the road where you said the bodies should be. There was nothing there. Not even the sign of a struggle.”

“The bodies of ten trained soldiers do not simply vanish.” He pressed a finger to the bridge of his nose. “What about Belladonna? There was another Gloucester steed in the barn. Wasn’t there?”

“Marianne told us as much.” Her eyes flickered. “But before you get your hopes up, Claude wasn’t convinced.”

“Please,” he said. “I just need more time. Something will slip, or come to light. It must.”

A rapping at the door drew their attention, and a guard groaned the old hinges open. “Ma’am, the carriage is ready.”

“Just a minute,” she called, her voice as strong and full of authority as he’d ever heard it.

As the guard retreated once more, Leonie turned to Lorenz, a kind of horrible fire in her eyes because she wasn’t made to see a fight and back down from it. “I’ll try to talk to Claude before we leave for the waystation tonight. Surely a more thorough investigation wouldn’t hurt.”

He worked around a lump in his throat. “Just hearing that you’ll talk to him means a great deal.”

Leonie looked at him as though she was hoping she was not making a terrible mistake, before rising to her feet and dusting off the cloth tied around her hip. Lorenz followed suit and reflexively began rubbing his wrists as he stood.

“One more thing,” she said. “You didn’t miss your ride, Lorenz. No matter what he said, I think he always intended to exile you. It’s Claude and you know how he hides it, but he’s hurting.”

He didn’t reply. Claude had said he didn’t want to watch Lorenz die, but he clearly didn’t care what happened after Lorenz left his sight. An affection he fantasized about sticking in one of those coffins swam through him, filling the part of him that hoped Claude cared enough to see reason, to give him more of a chance. Had he not earned that? Or had they both hesitated too many times to ask that of each other? Now, Lorenz only wanted to strangle that hope and walk to his future untethered, whatever it was.

“Well,” Leonie started as two guards flanked into the room, “let’s go pray, I guess.”

Leonie had stepped aside while heavy irons were clasped around Lorenz's wrists. He'd nearly stepped back, nearly turned to her to ask if ' _those were necessary_ ', but any complaint died on his tongue. When the guards entered his cell, he stood in place as the metal locks ground together. They bound him over his sleeves, which provided only temporary comfort from the rigid weight of them. By the time they were in the carriage, with two guards on either side and Leonie sitting across from him, he already felt the tender skin under his wrists being worn raw, the same way he recognized when a sunburn was coming on.

He sat in that bumping silence as the carriage rolled away. Any kind words he and Leonie shared earlier were lost in the presence of men unfamiliar with their former friendship. She had a job to do, after all, and he would never forgive himself if something in their conversation stirred rumors or scandal against her.

It started off by following the macabre pathway the draft horses had taken earlier before making a right nearly halfway down to maneuver through a crowded market side street. After a week in his cell, which had been quiet save for his exposure to the elements and the muffled sounds from the more crowded lower levels, the chaotic noise nearly brought his headache back. He could glimpse little bits and pieces of the activity out through the shaded windows, but he had no desire to lean over either of his forbidding guards to get a better look.

He barely noticed when the carriage slowed to a halt.

"Looks like we're here." Leonie uncomfortably swiped at her nose before going to open the carriage door. With a tight breath to brace himself, Lorenz stepped out after her.

Everything in Derdriu owed its features to one of the Alliance's previous rulers. Adrestian engineering and Faerghan stonework—as well as the church's strict standards and the occasional scars of civil unrest—had all left their mark on the capital's largest cathedral over the centuries. It was made of high white stone, more intricately carved than the ancient practicality of the church in Garreg Mach, though the nave was smaller.

He glanced around as he stepped onto the street and saw several soldiers. They were fanned out from the entryway, standing by signs posted at either end of the street. A few passersby watched and gestured at his manacles, and a hot flush rushed to his cheeks. It surprised him that Claude agreed to this in the first place. "All this for me?"

"It's for your own safety." Leonie glanced around them, her hand instinctively going to Lorenz's shoulder as they began ascending the steps together. He wanted to lean into that touch—soft and warm, even as he knew she'd easily haul him to the ground if he tried to flee. “You aren’t...popular right now.”

The sounds from the street grew distant as they crossed the threshold, and Lorenz found himself able to breathe for the first time in days. A couple priests drifted around the edges of the pews, eying him and his procession of guards. He wondered how much Claude donated to the local Church of Seiros to agree to such an arrangement.

Lorenz licked his lips. Under any other circumstances, he'd have been charmed.

Lorenz steeled himself, holding his shoulders high, as he approached a seat near the middle.

Next to him, Leonie shifted uncomfortably. "You'll have an hour. No one should approach you."

"Would you sit with me?"

"I have to keep the perimeter secure." She offered a weak smile, and once more reached out to touch his shoulder. "Don't worry. You'll be seeing plenty of me over the next few days."

He nearly laughed at being told not to worry, but resigned himself to solitude as she left him to his thoughts.

Sitting there brought some peace, only broken somewhat by the way even the slightest movement of his arms made his chains chirp and ring through the open structure. Good acoustics, he noted. He'd never been drawn to singing, the way Ferdinand was, instead opting for the rare quiet his time there had offered him, even during the busiest social days of his youth. Now it granted merely a one hour reprieve from a long journey, from the shame of having the Alliance ripped from him.

He sucked in a breath.

When had it all gone so _wrong_?

Bitterly, he liked to think that it had gone wrong the first time he saw Claude—when he was being presented as the old Duke's legitimate heir, but that wasn't fair to either of them. Lorenz had no way of knowing that his father's lifelong message that the Alliance would one day be his to rule was built on little more than lies and knives. He also liked to think things had first gone wrong at Garreg Mach when he noticed the sparkle in Claude's eyes. They were in the library and that was the first time Lorenz had the wild, intrusive thought of kissing him.

If he hadn't been so receptive to Claude, it may not have changed a thing. Lorenz had no way to know.

He still imagined it would all hurt less.

Before he knew it, his hour was almost up. Soon the bell would toll, and a countdown of mere days would begin. He doubted he'd be alive long after crossing the bridge.

Leonie was right; he hadn't missed his ride. It had merely been delayed.

Somewhere behind him, he heard the large doors open and shut. Leonie had a whispered exchange with someone, and he noted the guards stationed at various points of the building turning to look among themselves.

Someone stepped up beside him.

"I'm ready to go," Lorenz said with grim finality.

"Aw, so soon?"

A jolt went through Lorenz at the sound of that voice—haggard from illness, but rich and cocky and kind. Familiar, and so unlike it had been the last time they spoke.

Claude stood next to him, looking for all the world like one of the saints with the glow from stained glass behind his back. His hands casually rested on the sash he wore. His face was uncertain, grim, and downcast, his mouth set in a tight frown as his dark eyes burned with...Lorenz wasn't sure. He hoped it was, if not regret, some sadness to counter his frigid farewell.

If nothing else, the cold anger from the previous night was gone.

Claude had come back.

A swell of hope washed through him. He didn't believe in miracles, but surely this—

Lorenz tried to rise to his feet. The chain on the manacles rattled.

Claude shifted until his hip rested against the pew in front of Lorenz, and Lorenz sat up, following him like there was a string connecting his collarbone to Claude's cravat.

He dropped back against the pew, exhausted by disbelief. "I didn't expect to see you again after our last conversation."

"I wanted to talk to you." Claude's face fell. "I didn't like the way I left things."

"You mean when you exiled me?" Lorenz couldn't keep his voice down, and it echoed more through the church than he would have liked.

"Could we maybe speak somewhere else? Privately." Claude crossed his arms, eyes still shrouded. "There's something I need to tell you."

"Claude? Has something happened." Agast, Lorenz rose to his feet. Surely Claude wouldn't have come to find him if he wasn't having doubts.

He gestured behind him, off to a side door leading away from the main hall of the church. "It'll be easier to just tell you."

"Claude?" Leonie asked, from a few paces away. "This isn't what we talked about—"

"I know, I just…" Claude waved a hand as he started walking. "I just need a minute."

Lorenz did not look back to Leonie. Instead, he gathered up his chains and hollowly followed Claude to a set of large double doors.

The antechamber was a large artery leaving from the heart of the cathedral, and Claude led Lorenz down a short, high hallway that led to a secondary gathering room. It was more intimate, with older, narrower pews guarded by statuettes of the saints at regular intervals. The largest statue was one of Saint Seiros on the raised stand at the front, her face hooded and haloed by a crown of light and immaculately carved wings. The whole room was lit by the enormous stained glass window illuminating the Voice of the Goddess in blues, greens, and golds, as well as by small chandeliers holding flickering candles that hung at regular intervals.

Claude had gone uncharacteristically silent, ambling behind Lorenz's stiff steps, glancing up to observe the statuettes, themselves in various ages and states of disrepair. Lorenz noted that Indech, in particular, had had most of his jaw worn away by decades of people reaching out to ask for a blessing.

Lorenz paused at the front, near Seiros, and turned to face Claude. "Claude, what is this?"

He waited for the answer, helpless to do anything but hope the conversation wouldn't turn, that Claude wouldn't dip back to lethal detachment.

"I learned something today." Claude ran a hand over the back of a pew, visibly swallowing under his cravat. "And I think I made a mistake."

Lorenz froze in place, the chains gathered up in his fists ringing as his hands trembled. As soon as the word left Claude's mouth, he couldn't deny the relief—relief that his mind hadn't betrayed him, relief from the horror of Claude truly, bitterly hating him.

And in the wake of it came a rush of anger fed by anxious waiting and misery. He was only human, and he scoffed. "A mistake."

Claude took a step towards him. "Lorenz—"

"I'd have been dead three hours by now." Turning his back, because looking at Claude—looking at anyone—right then was too much. "I was worried for you, when they told me about the attempt on your life. It had to be a _mistake_. Surely you couldn't have named me the culprit when I was not even in Derdriu. Surely when you woke everything would be right." He began massaging a phantom pain under his jaw. "This isn’t a mere mistake to me."

"Perhaps I acted rashly, but what was I supposed to do? When I woke up...well, I'll be honest. I wasn't thinking about you. I just wanted to keep the Alliance together." Claude crept forward another couple of pews. "I thought my doubts didn't matter. Damn, Lorenz, I thought they couldn't matter."

He stopped an arm's reach from Lorenz, looking as miserable as Lorenz felt—actually, Lorenz admitted he also looked absolutely wretched. As always, they made quite a pair.

Two gloved fingers brushed at Lorenz's hair, just above his temple.

Lorenz slapped Claude's hand away and stepped aside. A _mistake_.

Lorenz wiped something from his cheek. He hated crying. He utterly hated it, and that brought seven days' worth of anger to the surface. "And just what was this mistake?"

Claude stayed where he was, crossing his arms and looking to the statue of Seiros. "Have you ever heard of the Agarthans?"

Something sparked in Lorenz's mind, through his frustration, as if the word was a distant echo of something, of another word he'd read in a book once. "I have not."

Claude acknowledged Lorenz’s answer with a hum, and once more hooked his thumbs into his sash. He stood under the watchful eye of Seiros, his face half in her shade and half illuminated by warped sunlight filtering through the glass. "I'm not surprised. The Church of Seiros has suppressed almost any mention of them in the historical record. But censors can't catch everything."

Lorenz moved back towards Claude. "What does this have to do with the man who attacked you?"

"I'm not sure yet, I think everything." Claude bent his head in deep thought. "Legend says they're shapeshifters with access to magic that isn't Reason or Faith. A school stronger than either one."

Lorenz thought back, his mind stumbling back through the long hours in his cell to when he'd left Gloucester. "The men who waylaid me on the road were connected to the assassin..."

"I think they were trying to keep two of you from showing up in Derdriu." Claude offered him a weak smile. "It shouldn't even be possible. They must be very clever, and very vengeful."

He sucked in a breath, and Lorenz's heart raced. It could have just been the lighting, but Claude's eyes seemed to _glitter_. If he himself hated crying, he was sure that Claude absolutely despised it, because he'd never seen his leader's eyes so much as water. "Please, Lorenz. Please forgive me. I have no idea what I would have done if..."

"It brings me no comfort to hear that." As if acting on instinct—and instinct it had to be, because he'd been taught of the inappropriateness of touch—Lorenz reached out to Claude's arm. Claude turned into him, the thick sleeve of his tunic wrapping around Lorenz's back as he fell into his chest. Lorenz gasped, and nearly lost his balance.

He blinked.

It wasn't what was there, really. There was warmth enough. There was emotion enough. Claude's arm wrapping around his back was solid, as sure as Lorenz wasn't dead, but...

Normally, Claude smelled like the sandalwood candles he liked to burn. Or some new cologne he was trying. In the past he’d come up to Lorenz, shoulder to shoulder, to ask if he liked it. When they'd been in school, Lorenz had flushed and stormed off while indignantly asking ' _What kind of a question is that?_ '. He wasn't sure when the shift happened, exactly, the first time he'd sniffed when Claude asked him to, but it was now nearly second nature. Lorenz usually ended up needing to admit that Claude had good taste.

Now Claude smelled like nothing. Not cologne, nor incense. There wasn't even a hint of the scents Lorenz would have associated with a sickbed—soaked bandages and stale sweat.

He frowned.

"I can hardly blame you." He carefully stepped through his words. "You told me you'd kill me if I joined the Empire, after all."

The Claude at his shoulder only responded with silence and held more firmly.

At that, Lorenz attempted to step away, only to find that he _couldn't_. The body against him was too rigid, the arm around his waist as strong and stiff and cold as stone—

If there was a flicker at Lorenz's elbow, the jolt of a body caught in a lie, it was subtle and only detected by the part of Lorenz's brain that, once again, sensed the presence of his own grave.

A lash of dread went through him as his throat tightened, as certainly as a snare snapped up a helpless rabbit somewhere.

"You're not Claude."

The other man let out a long-suffering sigh, alien and wrong.

"No, I'm not." His hand dropped to grip the dangling chains at Lorenz's wrists, holding them in a vice while his other hand snaked up to fist in Lorenz's hair and crane his neck back. "And you're not going anywhere."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my gosh, I truly never intended for it to be TWO MONTHS before I updated this after that cliffhanger. Thank you all for your patience, and I hope this chapter lives up to the last one. It really took me a minute to psyche myself up and really get this chapter out the way I wanted it to be.
> 
> Thanks to Sami (@NoPantsCosplay on Twitter) who did a line edit for me on super super short notice, and for Goop, who is perpetually familiar with my quirks. Thank you both so much for helping me get this chapter polished and ready to go out.
> 
> Chapter-specific warnings:  
> \- Agarthan agent playing with his food  
> \- Attempted Murder  
> \- Some fairly story-typical violence and blood.
> 
> There's gonna be one chapter after this one! Hoping it will be out pretty soon, but thank you again for everyone who has been reading and following this story.

Leonie was many things, chief among them _professional_.

She was part of Derdriu’s high command and one of Claude’s most trusted officers. Her responsibilities—much more her expectations—didn’t allow for many mistakes. Even the best mercenaries could die young; clumsy mercenaries usually ended up stumbling right into early graves, no matter how storied their military careers.

That would be embarrassing enough. Now a clumsy mercenary getting someone else killed? Someone they were meant to protect? That was far worse.

The cathedral was much as it had been minutes ago, with window panes taking the late afternoon glow and mottling the light as it passed through the window panes. Her soldiers had watched Claude von Riegan come into that peaceful space and take their prisoner into a back room, and had watched Leonie let them go.

At first, she’d been annoyed. It wasn’t like Claude to break from a strategy. True, there wasn’t always time for explanation, but his _plans_ had plans. Even if she didn’t know the purpose, she typically trusted that there was one, and in return Claude trusted her to accomplish her role in it.

But now, something tight gripped her chest as she stared at the old wooden doors she’d let Lorenz disappear through, her heart galloping so crisply she was surprised none of her soldiers were looking at her.

With a sigh, Leonie tore her gaze away, pacing instead towards the empty altar. They didn’t have access to the church much longer. Evening prayers would be starting soon, and she’d hoped to make it to the waystation by nightfall. She didn’t have time for paranoia.

It _had_ to have been Claude—

She knew him. He _was Claude_.

Leonie paused, her eyes burning a hole in the stone floor. She couldn’t blow the whole mission over a bad feeling. It was the kind of creepy, spy-born paranoia she had no interest in succumbing to.

But what if she was wrong?

“Shit.” She said, reaching into her pocket for the ceramic chip. “Shit. _Shit_.”

She drew a little bit of attention, her shaking fingers struggling to find purchase on the hard little corners. They still weren’t out yet. She had half a mind to barge in there herself, but if she was right—

The chip landed on the stone floor with a deceptively delicate clatter. She turned, casting one final look off in the direction that someone had taken Lorenz in, she muttered an emphatic, “Damn it.”

The heel of her boot smashed ceramic to pieces, and her ears popped as the spell reacted and dissipated, the slightest cool touch of airy faith causing the hair on her forearms to prickle.

She looked back to the door, heart thundering as second after second passed.

“Ma’am?”

One of her guards had come up behind her, but she barely noticed him there as her palm started sweating on the lance’s leather grip.

“When you see Duke Riegan,” she said, voice barely a whisper, “let him through.”

The guard blinked. “Duke Riegan? But he—”

“I said.” Her voice dipped forcefully. “Make sure he gets through.”

Though he seemed confused, the guard saluted and walked off, carrying only a sense of the urgency in Leonie’s bones.

She sniffed loudly, throat tight and ready for war. She wanted to be wrong. But if she was right, she wanted to run over, break down the door. But if she did, if Lorenz wasn’t already dead, she could be damning him. A lance was quick but a knife was quicker.

What had she _done_?

Claude and Lysithea waited in silence in a requisitioned room at an inn not far from the church. He placed a couple cubes of sugar into the coffee he’d ordered from the kitchen, and let it cool on the windowsill next to the chair he occupied. When he sat forward, he had a perfect view of the entrance to the cathedral, half-obscured by drapes and shaded by two other buildings. He’d picked this vantage point so he could see what was going on, but could not easily be seen from the street, and so he sat on the edge of his seat in a hunter’s pose as he watched people flit in and around the loose perimeter. Lysithea remained almost perfectly still at a cheap, small table where she stared intently at her tightly folded hands and the enchanted ceramic chip. Next to it, a rough candle burned, the wax formed into ridges and markings, each representing one hour.

Claude had lit the candle with a fast match the second he spied Lorenz crossing into the church, then reclaimed his seat. The tension in the air kept Lysithea from accusing him of being in a bad mood.

To Lysithea’s credit, she didn’t ask him why he was ordering coffee if they wouldn’t be there long, and to Claude’s credit he didn’t ask her if she wanted anything. He thought they would be there for some time, and he knew she would be anxious, ready to move at a moment’s notice.

So he sipped his coffee, and Lysithea waited, the tip of one of her nails occasionally drifting towards her teeth before she reined in the urge to bite them and nearly forced her palm back onto the smooth cotton tablecloth. The sounds of the city were muffled from the street below, and Claude could barely make out the details of passing faces from where he was.

About a quarter hour in, Claude’s stomach felt hot and unsettled. The coffee was more acidic than he thought, and his appetite was still fragile from a week of being bound to his bed. He did watch the entryway, although this part of the plan relied on keen, clever Leonie to notice something wrong from the ground. It was out of his hands, and he couldn’t deny how important of a job he’d given her. This sat uneasily with him, but his control over the situation had been in question since taking a knife to the gut. If Lysithea was right, he hadn’t even been able to see the change in Lorenz up close until it was too late. He simply had to remove himself from the plan until— _unless_ —the moment came to strike.

And he’d watched Lorenz intently over the years. Claude’s first instinct was suspicion—though it was almost a professional courtesy, as Lorenz was easily the worst spy in Fodlan. There’d been a fair bit of irritation, too. At Lorenz’s voice. His bossing. His frequent and blandly stated desire to make a wife of any noble lady in earshot. Claude wasn’t quite sure when that feeling stupidly blossomed into something else. Something like high singing silver in his chest. Almost-touches that began as jokes but quickly became serious. Now, he forced _all of it_ into cold indifference. The other option would be to let it fester into unmatched hate, but no one would be served by that. Nor did he wish to let grief take root.

It didn’t matter, and it would matter even less shortly.

At about a half hour, he checked Failnaught’s bowstring. Experimentally, he tested moving his slung arm. It didn’t pull too badly at the wound just under his ribs, though nothing about his body said he should be out spycatching.

Lysithea let out a tight breath. “It’s not enough time. An hour—”

“Is more than enough of an opening for a skilled assassin.” Claude brushed a gloved hand over his forming beard. True, it was a tight deadline, but Lysithea’s ghost—if he even existed—would be correcting a mistake. Frantic. When even trained agents got desperate, they got sloppy. With more time to plan, prepare, the danger of Claude’s plan—hypothetically—increased dramatically.

Lysithea settled back into her chair, where she could continue to stare at the unbroken tile.

So they returned to silence, which was fine by him.

Though part of the street in front of the church doors were blocked by a patrol of guards, people still came and went. A few passersby lingered, trying to get a glimpse of a disgraced noble—none of the Deer had implicated Lorenz in Claude’s ill health, but lords, soldiers, maids, and physicians all talked. The assassination of a duke was a rare thing, and the crime Count Gloucester’s son was accused of was even rarer. With no official word, the rumormill of Derdriu churned and people closely watched the debtor’s door on Wednesday mornings.

The candle sputtered. A few bells rang to signal the end of the afternoon. Lysithea had slumped down between her elbows, and the hands folded tightly over the top of her head crumpled her lace wimple.

Reluctantly, Claude rose to his feet.

“You didn’t finish your coffee.” Lysithea’s voice was muffled by the tablecloth.

“Didn’t feel like it,” he responded. He felt the edge creeping into his voice; born of anxiety, injury and sleeping on a damned couch instead of a bed. “I promised an hour. We’ve given it an hour.”

She shot upright. Something like desperation snapping through every muscle, sneaking into her wide violet eyes. “I’ve been waiting ten years.”

He didn’t move towards the door, didn’t take one more step past her small, upturned jaw or the stubborn set to her shoulders.

Claude pinched the bridge of his nose. Lysithea sounded so full of conviction. Was she truly so convinced her shadow existed? Did she believe that strongly in Lorenz’s innocence? Or, like all of them, did she just not want it to be true? Was he being stubborn—cruel? Or just believing his own eyes and ears?

Everything hurt. It had been a tiring and sick week. For all of them.

“You’ve barely given it an hour.” She stood up from her place at the table, as if to move between him and the door. Her sweeping sleeve arched towards the windowsill. Although their position was shadowed by other buildings, they could see the last peach oranges of sunset settling between the higher rooftops across the way, including the spires of the cathedral. Claude’s coffee was cold, and no longer trailed steam up into the air. “I know they will come for Lorenz. We just need to give it more time, watch for trouble on the road to Adrestia—”

With a deep breath, he forced his voice to soften. “Lysithea...we all have to move on.”

“That’s not…” she started.

A sound like a crunching teacup snapped through the small room.

Claude blinked. Unsure of what he’d heard at first, instinctively glancing back to the mug on the windowsill as Lysithea gently tugged at his sleeve to get his attention.

The mug was fine, but the ceramic tile on the table had shattered, as surely as someone had crushed it under their boot.

Leonie’s signal.

Claude’s cravat could have been made of lead, for all his throat tightened and the air in the room instantly staled.

“It could be a mistake,” Lysithea said. Only now did he notice how wide her eyes were, like a cat that had finally caught a mouse and had no idea what to do with it. “She could have dropped it.”

It couldn’t be...All it meant was that something had gone wrong. But that something could have been anything. Leonie would have called them for any perimeter breach. Spy or not, surely one dedicated person with a knife might—

There was no time to doubt. In a smooth motion, he removed the strip of cloth holding his left arm in place. With a few quick strides and his right hand, he grabbed Failnaught from where it rested under the window.

“Lysithea.” Claude’s voice was clipped, as confident as a battlefield command, even as his mind raced, even as he wavered. “Church. Now.”

She nodded. “Right.”

He felt magic building in the room, leading to a pressure, an itch behind his nose like the moment before a sneeze. Only in this case the sneeze was a reflex of reality—he had no talent for Reason, but he understood technically how it worked. Lysithea connected two points not just on a map, but in time, like stones submerged in a river.

That didn’t allow it to make sense to his mind how they could be in some hotel on Whistler street and then standing on the worn stone of the cathedral the next. From outside the ring of Alliance guards, a couple people shouted and pointed.

Claude only took a moment to catch his breath, doubling over his bandaged side because _wow, that stung_ , before he was taking steps two at a time and ordering a pair of guards to open the doors. Lysithea had shorter legs and overall was less fit, but at that moment their race to the church’s nave was fairly well matched.

The second he stepped into the echoing cool of the main chamber, he was looking around. He spotted Leonie coming towards him. Behind her familiar soldiers were mumbling amongst themselves.

He scanned every row, every pew, every altar and didn’t see a single flash of the ostentatious shade that meant he could pick Lorenz out in a crowd anywhere.

As Leonie approached, his stomach churned. She stared at him over pale cheeks, mouth slightly agape as she clutched her lance in bone-white hands. Claude recognized that look. The last time he’d seen her like that was after Jeralt died.

“Leonie, where’s Lorenz?” he asked, hiding the catch in his voice with exertion.

She shook her head.

His stomach twisted into knots. He asked again. “Where is he?”

“I should have listened to you,” she replied. Each word she spoke was another nail in a coffin’s lid. “I wasn’t thinking.” She indicated a large set of doors off to the side, shut and—based on how the young evening was going—probably locked. “Lorenz is in there. With someone.” She took a gulp. “I let him go. I thought it was an _order_.”

Claude’s mouth went dry like sand. He wanted to start shaking, find some outlet for the buzzing working its way down his back, but he wouldn’t. “Leonie, who could have ordered you to do that?”

Somehow, he knew the answer even as her shocked mouth formed it.

“You did.”

Lorenz had only a moment—some half-born helpless thought forming around the hand fisted in his hair and the sensation of his manacles being pulled down painfully to the ground. Somewhere, around the awkward bend to his neck and the _incorrect_ face by his shoulder, he opened his mouth to scream.

“Help!” He found the word and stirred his stunned voice to yell it out. “Somebody! H—”

“Now, _none_ of that.” Before he could spit it out again, the false Claude wrapped his forearm in chains so he could run his gloved thumb and index finger down the straightened ridge of Lorenz’s throat. A ribbon of silence smothered Lorenz’s voice mid-word, turning the cry into a feeble exhalation for him to choke on. He opened his mouth to call out again, panic gnawing at his frozen vocal cords, but no sound came out.

“There’s no point.” The timbre and tone of the voice in his ear was still right, even as the inflection went off. Lorenz struggled, and the stranger held tight. “I silenced the door on the way in. No one will hear you.” He laughed. “Even if they could, no one is coming to save you. You saw how easily she handed you over to me, her dear friend _Claude_.”

Lorenz shook his head as much as he could, and the angle of his neck was made more extreme in retribution, wrenching him until Lorenz was sure either his hair would tear or his body would.

With Lorenz frozen in pain, the stranger grinned. “I’ll lift the spell if you promise not to bleat the entire time.”

His lips were a vicious whisper against Lorenz’s ear, and it was fortunate he was out of range of Lorenz’s teeth. As much as his pride—and his desire to survive—wanted to burn through him and out into the antechamber, he needed to be smart. He was tired from his injuries and from his stay in prison. Right then, all he could do was gasp in panic around his hollow voice.

“Well?”

Lorenz nodded as quickly and clearly as he could.

His ears popped as the silence spell snapped loose, leaving a faint ringing in his ears as his own noises of pain seemed louder than before.

“That’s better.” The tightness of the grip relaxed, and for a moment, Lorenz relaxed with it.

His assailant threw him back into a pew.

The dizzying silvery walls and dazzling lights of the antechamber spun in Lorenz’s vision as his hip slammed into the hard wood backing with enough force to make the heavy seat tilt, balancing precariously before loudly crashing into the one behind it. For a moment, the cracking wood sounded and felt like it could have come from his own spine, and Lorenz only had a moment to cough out the shock from his lungs in a pile of splintering wood before he saw the shimmer of a blade overhead.

He braced for it to go in his chest before he realized the false Claude was merely absently brandishing it in one hand.

“You,” he pointed the tip at Lorenz from his standing position, like a teacher about to scold a student, “sent me on a merry little jaunt around Derdriu this morning.”

Lorenz blinked, unable to find the words to truly voice his confusion. With his chest still raw from the impact into the pews, he managed, “I’ve never done anything to you.”

“On the contrary, you ruined my breakfast.” He sighed, sticking one booted leg up on the overturned pew, still lording over Lorenz even as he casually rested his knife arm over his bent knee. “See, I was going to get up, have myself a beer and some eggs at the inn across the street from the debtor’s door and wait for noon with the rest of the bloodthirsty rubes.”

Lorenz’s confusion only deepened as Not-Claude tapped the flat of the blade against his calf. “Imagine my surprise when the prison cart finally comes rolling by and there’s no noble son of Gloucester on it. I thought, that can’t be right! Surely Claude von Riegan wouldn’t let an attempt on his life stand.”

Finally rallying his body into action, Lorenz scrambled down the length of the pew until he could grasp the lip of the upturned seat and haul himself upwards, never once taking his eyes off the... _thing_ in the room with him.

“It was you.” He gasped around the accusation. “You hurt Claude.”

Disregarding Lorenz’s accusation, he continued, “Well, maybe von Riegan just needed some time. Maybe he wanted you to have another week to get your affairs in order. Ponder your mortality. Sweat. But I started asking around just in case. Imagine my surprise when I find out that the traitor has been sentenced to _exile_.”

“You were bitter that you couldn't kill him, then,” Lorenz spat out, even as a surge of...true pride rushed up his chest and through his voice. He began to grasp and work at his chains, trying to get a better grip on them. He was no brawler, but perhaps he had a weapon after all. “Would watching me die truly have been a balm for your failure? I’m flattered.”

“I was starting to think you were the clever one, but you still don’t seem to get it.” The stranger watched him, hauntingly unfamiliar green eyes tracking Lorenz across the room like a lazy cat. He picked at his nail with the tip of the dagger, moving so he continued to stand between Lorenz and the door. “Huh. Tell me, what _did_ you promise von Riegan to get him to spare your life?”

“What?” Lorenz widened his eyes. “Nothing. I promised him nothing.”

“You didn’t say you’d spy on the Adrestian high command for him?” The stranger’s eyes narrowed, and he pointed the dagger accusingly at Lorenz again. “I mean...when I first heard, I thought maybe you—” he paused, broke off in a dry, joyless laugh and a smile that pulled falsely at the corner of his mouth to show teeth“—no, sorry. That’s too vulgar. Where are my manners?”

“There was no bargain, save my rapid departure from Derdriu. He clearly had no preference for which route I picked.” A pillar of rage and embarrassment went through Lorenz right then as he processed one phrase, one image after another. Despite himself, his cheeks went hot. “He gave me a choice and I took the one that would give me a few extra days of life. It’s as simple as that, though you don’t deserve the truth.”

“You know, if that’s true, I’m disappointed. I expected more from him.” The stranger sighed, airly waving his free hand. When he looked up at Lorenz, it was with a grin. “You should have killed him when you had the chance.”

Lorenz went forward into a duelist’s cut, swinging his chains like a dull, heavy whip. The stranger hadn’t been expecting it—and the heavy chain slammed into the space between his shoulder and neck, sending him falling dagger first into another pew. As he went forward, Lorenz struggled to catch his grip on the chains, but before the dagger was freed he was already halfway to looping his chains around the copy’s throat. With a knee to his back, Lorenz drew the chains tight.

But he hadn’t been fast enough. His companion had gotten one gloved hand under the chains, and when Lorenz’s arms tensed to pull them tight, he was instead dragged forward, his mouth, jaw, and nose connecting with the back of a solid skull.

Lorenz’s nose started bleeding even before the pain set in, sending fat droplets of blood down onto his shirt and the stolen tunic in front of him. Dazed, Lorenz barely understood what was happening as a hand grasped around his collar and the world shifted again. He went stumbling backwards, caught in the storm of the un-Claudelike fury on the face of his attacker and—he now understood—his murderer.

The stranger threw Lorenz towards St. Seiros. His feet tripped over the little carpeted step before her, and his shoulder hitting her heavy marble pedestal was the only thing that spared him from further trauma to his head.

He lay limp against the statue, damaged, weak, and tired. Before he could rally himself, Claude’s cruelly grinning face was over him, hand fisted in his tunic, foot pinning manacles to the ground, and the tip of his blade pointed squarely at Lorenz’s heart.

“If it’s any consolation...” Through his wild panting, the stranger’s grin fell, lapsing into something like sympathy. “He really did want to fuck you.”

The stranger rose up slightly, pitched his shoulder, and held the obsidian-shaded dagger aloft to the sky.

All Lorenz could do was watch in horror, track the curved edge as it slowly lifted, and wait for the moment when it came slashing downwards.

This was it. He was going to die here.

Or he was going to die before an arrow burst through the false Claude’s clavicle, dousing Lorenz in a spray of dark red blood that spurted out the stuck tip like a fountain. The dagger froze where it was, flagging as the other went to the new injury, to sputter and clasp around the traumatic, unquestionably fatal wound.

On instinct, Lorenz found traction on the ruined carpet and scrambled away, leaving his would-be killer to fall forward, awkwardly trying to sit up.

“Thanks for giving me a clear shot.” Claude stood at the end of the rows of pews, another arrow already notched in Failnaught’s string as he stared, coldly, at his own double. “Lorenz, are you all right?”

“I...I think so.” Lorenz swiped at his face to remove some of the blood.

Off to the left of the antechamber, Lysithea emerged from the pews, a spell readied on her hands, fingers shaking as she rounded to the altar.

Lorenz heard someone coming up behind him, and he glanced up just as Leonie grasped at his shoulder and sleeve, hauling him a few extra feet away even as she never took her eyes off of the second Claude, looking for all the world like someone who had just lept into an arena with a wolf.

Claude—the _real_ Claude, thank the Goddess—took a couple steps forward, eyes still carefully trained down the shaft of his arrow as a gore-coated face to mirror his own stared back at him.

“I’ve got to admit,” he said, voice as immaculate and smooth as Lorenz had ever heard it, “I did not expect to need to murder myself today.”

The doppelganger’s attention meandered sloppily around the room, blood pouring freely over a hand that was doing nothing to hold it in.

“Tell us who you are!” Lysithea stepped forward, voice high.

“You don’t have long.” Claude’s attention darted over to Lysithea, as if to tell her to pause. “If you talk, we can get you healing. Cooperate, and you’ll live.” He pulled back on the already strained bowstring and it loudly creaked. “Well, at least for a little while. I’m not in a very forgiving mood.”

“You want to know who I am?” The doppelganger’s voice no longer sounded like Claude, instead, it echoed, split and broke into several voices, fractals. A low, raspy laugh filled the room, gargling blood. “I am an understudy.” His bloody hand snaked up towards his mouth. “And you’re all going to need to be a lot better at this.”

Claude’s eyes went wide. “Wait! Stop!”

But it was too late. The doppelganger’s jaw clenched tight, and from where he was Lorenz heard a dull pop followed by the angry hiss of lather. Foamy spit dribbled from parted, ashen lips, filling the room with the faintest smell of bitter almonds, and the light was already gone from his eyes by the time Claude finally lowered Failnaught. He was gone.

“No,” Lysithea hissed. “No. No. No. We needed him alive. I—” She angrily slapped her small hand against the pew. “ _Damn it_.”

But even Lorenz barely noticed the outburst, instead his eyes were glued to the body on the floor as the color rapidly drained from its skin—all of it, right down to the pale gray flesh of a week-old corpse, not one freshly dead. Claude’s likeness bled away along with the blood draining down the shaft and dripping off the arrowhead.

When Lorenz finally tore his eyes away from the macabre testament propped underneath the altar, Claude had his eyes firmly on the ground, boring into an old rug on the floor of the church antechamber. Failnaught rested quietly in his right arm as the hum from his crest faded. He looked far away, stunned.

Any of the Deer knew that look better from a battlefield, or rather the aftermath of one, when one poor decision left an entire battalion as little more than shredded meat or smoldering skulls. Claude reacted to nothing Lysithea said, and he did not seem to notice when Leonie helped Lorenz to his feet.

Lorenz had never wanted to run towards someone more in his life, but Claude’s stiff stance, his carefully maintained distance, kept him as far away as a wall of thorns. Next to him, he felt Leonie’s hand fall to his forearm, just above the shackles. “We should...we should get these off. I thought I had a key somewhere…”

Lorenz sniffled loudly, heart still thundering with the shock, the recent memory of the dagger about to be driven through his throat. “I suppose you’d want to ask me something only I would know.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” When Claude finally spoke, he sounded like someone had taken a scoop out of him, guts and all.

“Why go to all this trouble?” Lorenz asked after a long while, chains clattering as his hand drifted back towards his collarbone. “He said...I don’t understand.”

“I think I do.” Claude swallowed. Lorenz wanted to run over, grab him, get him to look—

“What do you mean?” Leonie said. “Claude, _what’s going on_?”

“Lysithea’s changeling is real.” Claude stood stock-still. Finally, he turned to face Lorenz. As frigid as he had been in the prison, that coolness was replaced with a wide-eyed shock, his mouth slightly open as if ready to give voice to a breathless apology for which there were no words. “It wasn’t Lorenz that attacked me.”

At those words, there was a horrified unwinding in Lorenz’s stomach, as if some flightless, hopeless thing inside him regained strength. His hands shook, and the chains rattled. His mouth opened, and a sharp, relieved breath crept out of him. “Claude—”

“Before you thank me, let me finish,” Claude said, still sounding hollow instead of relieved. Lorenz couldn’t possibly understand why—Claude survived his injuries, and no one had been punished in a copy’s place. They should all be celebrating. _Lorenz_ wanted to celebrate. “You weren’t just a loose end.”

A little cold, odious feeling went through Lorenz. “Despite how I like to boast otherwise,” he responded, “I am not quick enough at the moment to follow your logic. How can that possibly be true?”

“If I was supposed to be dead, I’d be in the ground.” Claude’s fingers drummed along Failnaught’s grip as he spoke. “But I could live and accomplish what they wanted. It was _better_ if I lived.”

“They?” Leonie asked, her lance hovering protectively, as if ready to skewer the body if it showed a single sign of life. Claude’s features had almost entirely burned away from the face.

“The masked mages.” Lysithea sat at the edge of one of the pews, her hands folded tightly on her forehead in frustration.

“Count Gloucester hasn’t moved against Derdriu yet.” Claude spoke cleanly, succinctly. “Not directly. Even with Imperial support, he knows it’s a risk, and he still needs to contend with the people of Gloucester, not all of whom like the idea of Adrestian rule. The count needed a push.” Claude squeezed his eyes shut. “Something like the archduke having his son summarily executed.”

“But,” Leonie said, “Gloucester doesn’t have the forces to take Derdriu cleanly. That would mean civil war.”

“That had to have been the goal,” Lysithea said. “To weaken us for the Empire?”

Lorenz listened carefully, his heart sinking further with each word, each lethal conclusion. Dread crept through him.

Claude took a deep breath, again turning to face Lorenz. “This was always about you.”

“I still don’t…”

“You were meant to hang.” Claude’s voice cracked, fractured in a way Lorenz had never heard. “An action that doubtlessly would have driven your father to open rebellion. When I sent you into exile, the assassin panicked.”

“He could not risk returning—wherever he crawled out of—with me still alive and the Alliance not in the throes of civil strife.” Thoughtfully, Lorenz ran his tongue over his teeth. Even that made little sense. Why take the risk to kill him now, when he was still under Claude’s eye and under armed guard, instead of waiting for him to be alone and vulnerable in Adrestia? If this order was truly in league with the Empire, why not wait? Surely it would have had a similar effect. Regardless of where he died, it would have still been on Claude’s order.

Yet the assassin _had_ come to kill him in Derdriu. As Lorenz’s mind tumbled over the possibilities, the hooks and pitfalls, he continued speaking. “But if that’s the case then...”

“I never—”

“You _knew_.” Horror snaked its way through Lorenz’s chest and he whirled towards Claude with newfound energy. “You used me as _bait_.”

“Lorenz, I—” Claude took a step towards him, and his eyes fluttered. He opened his mouth, swayed, blinked.

“Claude.” Lorenz took a step towards Claude the second before he fell. He lunged forwards, chains clattering as he awkwardly cupped Claude’s broad shoulders with his bound arms. He kept him from smashing his head on anything, but the two of them went down together—Lorenz weak and Claude looking sickly as he collapsed limply on Lorenz’s folded knees.

When Lorenz moved to look at his hand, his palm came away red.

Feeling sick, he looked down to where a dark spot about the size of a fist blossomed from under Claude’s left side. _No. No, no, no_.

He put pressure to the damp cloth as best he could, his other hand going to Claude’s jaw. “ _Claude_. Claude, don’t you dare do this right now. I forbid it.”

It felt like it lasted forever, wondering if there was any way he could get Claude outside, if perhaps there was a healer on the street or one with the company of guards Leonie brought with her. He heard words over the ringing in his ears, but they were merely shapeless raven’s caws as he reassured himself that Claude was still breathing.

“Lorenz.” Lysithea gently shook his shoulder. “Lorenz, I need you to step aside. I can warp him back to the palace but I can’t take all three of us.”

Dimly, Lorenz placed Claude on the floor and slid back awkwardly as Lysithea knelt beside him and placed her hands on his shoulders. The warp whispered them back to the palace, and Lorenz’s shoulders bumped into a pew. He felt Leonie crouch down to place her palms tightly on his shoulders as she pressed her forehead into his cheek, mumbling something like, “Goddess, what did we almost do?” into the spot where the tendons of his neck met his ear.

It was almost an embrace, one that Lorenz was too numb to return. He tried anyway, his eyes locking once more on the gray skinned, white-haired body resting under the statue of St. Seiros, then at the place where Lysithea had warped away Claude’s unconscious body.

Lorenz didn’t know what he would do if he lost Claude after all this. If their last memories of each other were—

He curled over his knees without dignity, choking down something like a sob as Leonie held him more tightly.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, it's been a long road, but here we are! Thank you everyone who has followed this fic (and maintained faith through the slowly rising chapter count). This was my first Claurenz fic, and I've been immensely grateful for all the support and feedback it has received.
> 
> There are a TON of people I want to thank. Ink for originally talking through this idea with me (back in the fleeting days when I thought it was going to be a one-shot), as well as Goop, Ink, and Steph for all joining in on brainstorms when I was pulling my hair out. AND for the list of betas who have helped me tackle this fic Ink, Goop, Steph, Sami, and Sneakiest: Y'all ROCK and I could not have gotten this super dense chapter out on such short notice without you.
> 
> And now! The conclusion!

_Duke Riegan,_

_Stories of your recent ill health have drifted south. I will start by saying that I would have been disappointed to hear that you had fallen to an assassin’s blade in your rooms, lured in by the oldest trick I am aware of. I am truly relieved that the death of Claude von Riegan will not be merely a heavily-debated footnote in a future Adrestian textbook or Faerghan historical drama. A well-placed poison or death at the conclusion of a stunning military campaign would be far more fitting demises._

_You have already learned that someone wore his face. It was a feat not achievable via any simple parlor trick. Height, weight, the cut of his hair, his eyes, and his voice—all a perfect mimicry, inexplicable by the magic or science at our disposal. It likely could have fooled his own father, though we both know that is not saying much._

_For what my sincerity is worth, please accept it when I say I am glad I am not revealing this deception to you under other circumstances. We both know it would have made a poor tribute to the dead._

_You have seen the proof. Felt it in your own gut. You are aware, now, of a fifth entity among us. One that I believe we may be able to help each other address._

_I speak of a threat to all, one that has lurked in the shadows for generations and would have waited centuries more—in possession of abilities and technology that surpass our own. Allies murdering one another is only the first of many ways they plan to exact revenge on humanity and the children of the Goddess. The ploy against you is the intent of their leaders writ large for Fodlan._

_You have perhaps captured a very personal glimpse of the suffering they would inflict in the event that no army remains strong enough to contain them._

_I believe we may have a common enemy, if you can find neutrality with another. As a show of good will, I have attached part of a blueprint that hints at the danger posed._

_Signed,_

_A Hound_

Claude had paused when he discovered a pristine, tawny envelope placed with his incoming mail. It was unusual, out of place—not like the others sitting in the little wooden box on his desk. Three pleas for clemency from Ferdinand von Aegir had arrived in short succession, and like most of his mail, those had been thoroughly searched before he ever saw them. These sat on the top. However, a fourth letter had been slid into the middle of the stack, the flap still tightly sealed by a wax button. How it had gotten there, Claude didn’t know, though he would be further tightening his security.

He’d already read and reread the letter several times. He probably should have called in one of his specialists to come open it with gloves, smell and test the paper to make sure it hadn’t been laced with some kind of deadly poison, or run a palm lit with faith over the surface and ink to make sure there were no hidden sigils or messages. With the month he’d had, it would be the smartest, most cautious thing to do.

Instead, Claude grabbed the letter opener on his desk and gutted the casing himself.

Instinct told him who the author was. The name didn’t float fully formed to his mind the second he found it, more that he had an impression of shrewd and practical guile in between lines of viscous ink notated by harsh handwriting. He remembered the hand at the other end being frugal and cruel, attached to a mind that was on his shortlist of suspects responsible for the scheme that had left him bleeding in his room and Lorenz spending a week in a cold cell. Granted, that would signal an escalation of violence—and awareness of Adrestia having access to new and terrible magic that Claude hadn’t even dreamed of.

Attached to the letter was a schematic marked with rough diagrams clearly copied from an old, faded text. A lot had been left out, but a few jagged lines and incomplete sectors told Claude that the original manuscript was likely incomplete. As he started pouring over the notes and designs, he experienced a little childish thrill, the same curiosity he’d had turning up rocks as a boy. Sometimes he found squealing round toads dusted in wet sand from a fresh rain; other times he discovered small adders that would puff themselves up until he went away.

A bite from just one of those snakes would have melted holes in his arm.

Curiosity bled away into something grimmer when Claude realized he was looking at a weapon. Or part of one.

The mathematics drew his attention next, and his heart raced as he tore off some scratch paper and ran the numbers again and again. Each time he came up with results that didn’t make sense to faith or reason, much less _physics_. After the information settled in him, he’d have to get Lysithea to check his calculations. He knew his way around, but he wasn’t a mage.

Claude bit his lip, tripping again over the way the writer phrased ‘other circumstances’. A gentle way of putting it, one that still made Claude’s stomach churn. The neutral language inferred that it wasn’t his fault—not along any fair metric. He hadn’t known what game they were playing. That knowledge wouldn’t have dampened the horror, and it wouldn’t do much to change the nightmares he’d be having for the rest of his life. Now in his dreams, he regularly saw Lorenz lying in a pool of blood or ascending a scaffold, both on Claude’s order.

Claude always joked that he could use a few more bad dreams for the pile, just to keep things fresh every night. He wasn’t laughing.

If things had been different, would the sender have still contacted him? Or had Claude run a gauntlet and passed a test? Either way, he hoped that part was a lie, at least; the merciful thing would have been to let him live in ignorance.

He set the letter back on his desk amidst a sea of scratch paper and equations. He forced his fingers into his scalp, massaging the tightness there as his hair billowed up between his hands. He had a lot of thinking to do. Chiefly over whether or not he thought this was a trap. Smart money said yes, of course, but he wasn’t so sure.

Damn.

Claude licked two fingers and snuffed out the candle near his arm.

The sun shone brightly over the gazebo, shade making it even bluer and grayer than the bright light on the lawn outside. After the storms from the previous week rolled out, the weather in Derdriu brought with it a kind of summerlike brilliance, one that almost made Lorenz too warm in his lilac tunic. It was odd to him, because only a week ago he’d been curled up on a prison cot not sure he would ever be warm or wear fineries again. Even with sweat at his sleeves and collar, he kept his posture, stopping only to sip water from the crystalline glass Raphael had fetched for him.

“I’m almost done with this side,” Ignatz said, not once drawing his eyes up from the sketchpad in his hands. He worked quickly—first with a pencil before grabbing at sticks of soft charcoal in black, gray, and white. The goal at this stage, he’d explained, was to capture sketches of Lorenz from different angles, and to try and get a sense for his best side and which features he may want to hide. “We can take a break, if you’d like.”

“I can sit for a while longer,” Lorenz said, replacing the glass on the seat beside him. The last portrait he had of himself was from before he left for Garreg Mach. In light of recent events, he’d decided to commission another. Ignatz was, of course, his first choice, and Lorenz utterly refused when Ignatz initially offered to do it for free. “Though I said this isn’t necessary. I truly liked the last one you did.”

Ignatz smiled. “I have just a couple more angles I want to get—then you can tell me what you think.”

“Very well. If you insist.”

There was a weighty pause before Ignatz said, “Although, if you’re bored—”

“Truly, Ignatz, this is lovely. I merely worry for those clever tendons of yours.”

Lorenz couldn’t remember having such an easy time sitting still for his original portrait. Now, with Ignatz sketching him a couple hours each day, Lorenz found it easy to enjoy the smell of the honeysuckle that climbed the gazebo, the feeling of sunlight on the hand he outstretched from under the canopy to dry the fresh, white lacquer on his nails, and a thousand other things he’d somehow never noticed before, even with a poet’s eye.

“Are you sleeping all right, Lorenz?” Raphael asked from his position resting on the small staircase, back pressed against a Morfis-style carved wooden column. His fingers worked to carefully knit a thick yarn together.

“Of course I am, dear Raphael.” Lorenz tried to hide his yawn behind a carefully placed wrist. “Please don’t trouble yourself.”

That was an ignoble lie.

After Claude had been taken back to the palace healers, Leonie pried the chains off of Lorenz’s sore wrists. With his name cleared, he’d followed her in a daze and waited in one of the foyers. Fortunately, they didn’t need to wait long before Lysithea came to tell them that Claude only lost consciousness from exertion and the pain of tearing his stitches. The bleeding had not started again in earnest.

Relieved that Claude would live, Lorenz then dimly let Leonie maneuver him back to his rooms. He needed rest. They all needed rest, but with the way her hands clenched around his elbow, he knew she wouldn’t be letting him out of her sight any time soon.

When she got him to the door, they discovered the carnage.

It was not wanton destruction: every drawer was methodically emptied and placed on the ground, and the wallpaper around his windowsill had been sliced while Claude’s spycatchers searched for any secret compartment he may have been using to hide Alliance secrets or malevolent communications. The mattress and pillows were lacerated, and so was the settee by the far wall, leaving feathers spread about the room like a light dusting of snow. His correspondence was gone from the broken wooden lockbox on his desk.

Most troubling to Lorenz, his books lay in a heap, having been surgically removed from their bindings with crisp, confident cuts. He collapsed in a nest of dismembered, saddle-stitched pamphlets that had once been a part of rare, beautiful collections of poetry, literature, and history. They were ruined now.

After allowing himself a moment of raw grief, he began marshalling the loose pieces. First he separated them based on condition. The ones merely severed from their bindings were still acceptable, but a few pages had been utterly trampled. Leonie sat next to him, shyly trying to sort based on size and order by page number, even if she couldn’t be sure which book was which. She’d sometimes reach into the pile that Lorenz had deemed “hopeless” to smooth out the crumpled pages on her thigh and tell him, ‘ _This one isn’t so bad, see?_ ’

Standard procedure. Nothing personal. It shouldn’t have mattered. His heart shouldn’t have clenched the way it did. He was lucky to be alive and these were _things_. But they were _his_ things.

When Lorenz finally bathed, he nearly fell asleep waist deep in the prison grime he scrubbed from his skin and hair. He went through several rinses, until his scalp ached and his chest was pink.

While he’d been washing, Leonie apparently found him a fresh pillow and did what she could to brush the loose feathers off the tatters of his bed. He couldn’t remember thanking her, although he had to have thanked her.

The mattress still hadn’t been replaced. He was not sleeping well.

“All right,” Ignatz said. “All done.”

He rose from his little folding chair and came to sit next to Lorenz, who stretched his aching back and eagerly examined the two newest sketches in the book. He first spotted an earlier one—a straight-backed third-quarter view with the shorter side of his hair turned towards the viewer, wearing a dour expression as he sat with his hands crossed on his lap. It was fitting, captured his physical likeness well enough, and it seemed improper to make Ignatz do more when that one was _fine_. Lorenz scanned a couple more before the new sketch at the end of the page drew his eye.

It was something else entirely.

He faced the artist from behind the violet sweep of hair he kept carefully and primly maintained, though he was not hiding. The version of him in graphite had a confident sparkle to his eyes and showed the daring upturn of his sharp jawline over a fluffed cravat. Notably, his lips were turned into a confident smile—one he recognized, though he’d not had an occasion to assume much lately. For a long time, it had been his noble mask, friendly to allies and an affront to rivals.

Claude had always called it devilish, back when Claude spoke to him and didn’t find an excuse to leave as soon as Lorenz walked into a room.

He pointed to it and offered Ignatz a nod. “I quite like this one.”

The extra waiting felt somewhat worth it for the way Ignatz beamed at him. “If I’m being honest, it was my favorite, too.” He seemed to puff up with pride. “We can start with that pose next time.”

At this, Lorenz did smile, because he was happy with the result and because Ignatz expected it. “Thank you, Ignatz. I mean that.”

Ignatz began collecting his materials, and Lorenz again looked out over the open space beyond the gazebo. Ignatz and Raphael had not attempted to discuss the events of the past month with him, and for that he was eternally grateful. In some ways, he preferred it to Leonie’s forceful, blunt mothering or Marianne’s mission to check on him nearly every day. He was grateful for the kindness they offered, but as his spirits and health improved, it made it hard to forget the reason why he had needed their care in the first place. With Raphael and Ignatz, it felt like they had picked up where they left off, aside from Lorenz realizing he always should have been as appreciative of them as he currently was.

As for the last two members of their band, well…

Within his own heart, he could manage lingering suspicion from the soldiers, the people, or even Hilda. He didn’t want to admit that receiving that same chill from Claude was eating away at him. Lorenz dearly wished Claude would say something. He’d have even welcomed some glib litany about how dramatic he was being.

Lorenz just didn’t know what to do or if he should do anything at all.

When Lorenz came back to his office, the first thing he noticed was something missing from his desk.

The pile of shredded paper and leather bindings, each carefully sorted and held together with ribbons to the best of his ability, was gone. This left a blank, dark spot of bare cherry grain where they used to sit, and Lorenz greeted this with curiosity before panic. He’d brought the miserable stack down from his rooms so he could get quotes from the book binders at the library. For a moment, he wondered if perhaps he had arranged for them to be collected and it had merely slipped his mind.

His memory had been slipping a lot lately, after all. Marianne said it was more likely the frights he’d experienced than the blow to the head, but he had no way of knowing for sure.

As a soldier passed outside his door carrying an armful of papers, Lorenz stepped out of his office in two quick clicks of his heels and called to the soldier, “Sergeant? A word, if you please.”

“Sir?” She shuffled her papers and quickly offered him a salute, though he saw—uncertainty? suspicion?—drift across her face.

He gestured into his office. “There was a stack of books on my desk. They were hard to miss, and all in quite a state of disrepair.” He’d been writing around them for days. “Do you happen to know where they went?”

“Oh,” she said, “apologies, My Lord. I thought you knew. His Grace asked to have them sent off for binding.”

Lorenz felt rather dull as he processed her words.

He gave a weak smile that was not returned. “Right, of course. The fault is mine for forgetting. Please, carry on with your duties.”

As she left, he turned to stare at the empty space where the books had been, furrowing his brow so deeply his headache threatened to return.

Claude had selected a tradesman and had the manuscripts collected, all without consulting him? That was fine under normal circumstances. He had no doubt that Claude’s standards were as high as his own, so surely the books would be well taken care of.

But that meant Claude had to have _known_ the books were on Lorenz’s desk, which implied he had been by to see them. Had Claude come to break the awful silence, or was he simply lurking around? Even before beginning his search for a proper contractor, Lorenz knew it would be tremendously expensive to have his books repaired correctly. He suspected that this was Claude’s way of offering to pay for the work done by his spycatchers. It was still a high price for an apology with no words to accompany it, not even a letter or a card. In fact, it bordered on being an act of financial self-flagellation.

And still, Claude conveniently fled any room Lorenz entered. Was the quiet born of guilt, or could Claude simply not stand the sight of him any longer? Could it be both? Lorenz felt a pang of loss. All he wanted to do was storm up to Claude and give him grief about it before graciously accepting the gift.

Lorenz sighed heavily. At some point, the sniping and bluster had become theatre. He missed it. Things could not continue as they were. It was simply unacceptable.

He turned on his heels and crisply closed his office door behind him (making sure to lock it this time) and quickly left the administrative and military wing behind him. He passed a few soldiers on the way, all of whom hesitated in their salutes. Even if he hadn’t spent the last week as Derdriu’s most eligible gallows bird, suspicion about the disappearance of the soldiers in his battalion had plenty of time to fester among the ranks. Sure, the archduke lived, but what about the ten people that went to Gloucester with Lorenz and failed to return? Whose bodies had never been found?

He understood their reasons for it. Even with Claude’s official story—that Lorenz had been a key player in the apprehending of an Imperial spy—their trust in him was shaken. Lorenz always wanted to make himself someone who drew attention when he entered a room, but now those glances were made sideways and accompanied by whispers.

Lorenz climbed the high sandstone steps that led to the old duke’s quarters—a room Claude had only accepted as his own because his grandfather had pushed caution into paranoia. It was easily the most defendable room in the palace, with only one way in or out save for someone able to scramble up or down the old tower wall.

Unless Claude let them in.

As Lorenz approached the top of the stairs, his resolve began to falter. His steps slowed, the sound of his boots growing quieter between the high wall and the open railing overlooking the rest of the palace. He stalled completely to stare up at the last few steps of the curved staircase.

Even if Claude was in his rooms, what did Lorenz plan to say? Surely not that things were all right, because he didn’t know if that was true for himself, much less Claude. The silence felt like a sickness, but he still didn’t know if it was some act of self-imposed penance or if the memory of Lorenz’s double hurting him was still too fresh.

No matter what Lorenz’s reasons were, cornering Claude with everything still so raw between them felt...incorrect.

But the books had to mean _something_. Even if Lorenz never asked for it, if it was supposed to be some kind of peace offering, he could not miss the chance to let Claude know that he wanted to talk more than anything in the world.

Lorenz straightened his back and shoulders. The conclusion he came to was the same one he had come to previously, despite having less fire in his blood for the impending discussion. He was not made to guess at Claude von Riegan’s motivations. They had to talk.

He took the last few steps cautiously, with his hands folded behind his back and fighting the urge to pick at the fresh layer of paint on his nails.

Oddly enough, when he reached the large, aged door to Claude’s rooms, he found it ajar. The reinforced portal was meant to help the inhabitant make a last stand during a siege or surprise attack. Normally, Lorenz had to slam his knuckles against it just to keep the heft of the door from smothering the noise. To find it unlocked would be strange enough, but Claude wouldn’t have left it open.

“Claude?” he called out, a little twinge of worry working through him. “Are you in there?”

No answer. His throat went dry, instantly filling with thoughts of more assassins, more killers that could wear the face of another as a mask.

“I’m coming in!” He didn’t quite say it with panic, but when he hefted the large door inwards with a loud creak, he was somewhat more frantic than necessary.

It took his eyes a second to adjust to the dark of the room. Claude wasn’t in there—it looked like no one had been in there for some time—and a good deal of the furniture had been reshuffled. The large table where Lorenz and Claude had once sipped alcohol and schemed against Count Gloucester by candlelight was now shoved against the side of the room, with its chairs scattered haphazardly across the space. The bedframe no longer had a mattress or sheets.

Lorenz’s eyes darted down to the space just outside the ray of light from the doorway, where the rug should have been.

It was gone like the mattress and sheets. In its place, a dark stain had settled into the old wood floor from where it pooled through and under the decor. Clearly, no one thought to clean it just after it happened, because the color had time to seep into every grain and crevice of a floor that had not been properly treated in a long time. The floorboards ate it up.

Lorenz could have told himself it was red wine.

Instead, his stomach churned.

How much blood—of Claude’s blood—had it taken to leave a stain like that?

Lorenz was aware of Claude’s injury—he’d almost died for it, but even when Marianne told him Claude was bedridden, even when Claude came to visit him with his arm in a sling, Lorenz never actually considered that the wound was nearly fatal. It seemed preposterous.

As he stood in a room that faintly smelled like copper and cold death, Lorenz realized how close to losing Claude they had all come.

Someone cleared their throat behind Lorenz. Startled, he whirled around to see Hilda leaning against the doorframe, illuminated by the sun’s light, as she stood just outside the threshold.

Lorenz took a step back, unsure of how the conversation would go, though there was nothing threatening about her stance. If Claude spent the last week avoiding him—ducking out of rooms, not making eye contact, and conveniently being gone from any place Lorenz might find him—Hilda had vanished from his sight entirely after Claude revealed the truth.

Despite Hilda’s distance, her sneer and the angry “ _What is he doing here?_ ” she’d shot him across Claude’s infirmary bed before the situation was explained still echoed in Lorenz’s mind like a sour note. He didn’t know what to make of Claude’s absence, but he thought he understood Hilda’s.

Her arms were crossed over her chest and she had her head half-turned, as if eyeing him yet unwilling to meet him completely. She wasn’t wearing the makeup she typically would, leaving her lips appearing chapped, cheeks patched with pink made brighter by the shade of her hair, and her eyes looking somewhat sunken. Hilda’s pink locks, done up into the long twin ponytails Lorenz was used to, seemed dull.

She sniffed and swiped at her nose. “Hey.”

“Hilda,” he said, carefully, wondering if she was about to cry foul on him for snooping around the Duke’s keep, “are you looking for Claude?”

“No. I mean”—she shifted until she stared directly at the floor—“he’s actually not staying here right now.”

“Oh, I see.” Lorenz felt foolish. Of course Claude wouldn’t be sleeping in the room where he’d almost died. “Do you know where he’s staying?”

She smiled, and it was a ghost of her usual teasing exuberance. “Claude’s...not really telling me much of anything right now.”

The tone of her voice pinged some high note of recognition in his mind. Why would Claude be angry with Hilda?

“He’s had a lot on his mind.” Lorenz shuffled, wondered if he should try to move past the door. “The idea of a new enemy or the Empire having a novel weapon at their disposal is unsettling for all of us.”

She swallowed and stood up straight. “Actually, I um, saw you coming up here.”

Lorenz blinked. So _that_ was where this conversation was headed. He raised his hand as a gesture of acquiescence and made for the exit. “I was just leaving.”

“No, I mean— _shit_.” She pressed a thumb to her forehead. “I mean I wanted to...talk. I guess. Or something.” She sucked in a breath, hard, and looked at him—genuinely—for the first time in weeks. “I suppose someone told you. You know, how I acted when you were gone.”

Lorenz followed her words until the end, when surprise unseated him. Afterwards, piteous discomfort settled in his chest, and he instantly pushed it aside. _This_ conversation he had not been expecting. Immediately, he longed for Ignatz and Raphael’s seamless transition back to the way everything had been before, as if nothing had ever happened.

“Hilda,” he started, “please, do not worry yourself over it. I only want to leave the whole sordid affair behind us.”

“Well, I don’t.” She splintered away from the doorframe, coming up to him with wide eyes, heavy steps, and her hands still gripping her own arms. She carried all the languid bluster he was used to but none of the cheer.

Though Lorenz didn’t retreat, he did flinch backwards as she approached him. She stopped, looking up, and it would be absurd if there weren’t the faintest tears forming in her eyes. Though she could be abrasive and strong-willed, the venom in her voice was something he hadn’t heard before, and he was struck by the feeling that not a drop of that poison was meant for him.

She looked behind him, to the wide stain on the floor. “Marianne and I found him, you know. Dying. I wouldn’t have thought to come up here but I saw you—the spy, the assassin, whatever—leaving the hallway covered in blood. When Claude said you were the one that did _that_ ,” she gestured broadly to the ground, “I was so _mad_. For weeks. And I was mad at Marianne for defending you. I said we should...” She sucked in a breath. “And you didn’t do a damn thing.”

Lorenz followed her narrative, ugly truth behind ugly truth.

Had the assassin targeted someone else, it could just as easily have been him stumbling across Claude bloody and dying. He wondered what would have been left of him after he poured every ounce of his meager faith magic into a fatal wound, what grief-born path he’d have trod when he inevitably failed.

“It was a trick. A terrible, deadly trick.” He frowned. “This scheme was meant to turn us against one another. What’s important is how we—”

“I said you deserved to die. I said it a _lot_.” She snapped it out like breaking a twig. “If Iggy and Raph and Marianne weren’t so fucking nice…”

Moving smoothly, Lorenz stepped between her and the spot on the floor. “We cannot know what might have happened if things were different. Had Claude died, I certainly would have perished regardless of what any of you wanted.”

Lorenz felt the ugliness of the thought even as it left his throat. _Had Claude died_. He would have soon followed, that went without saying. However, something worse occurred to him, scraping along his insides like an angry cat: the Alliance would have been leaderless. Everything they had fought for, dreamed of—

Hilda angrily shook her head. “Stop.”

“Stop what?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Stop trying to _forgive_ me.” The tears threatening to fall finally did, and she wiped them away as if she had a chance at hiding them.

Lorenz’s heart fell. No matter what had happened...seeing her in such pain weighed heavily on him. “If you apologized, I might accept it.”

“I think that’s why I can’t.” Her voice went high, cracked. She took a step away from him, towards the winding staircase. “I um, I think I need to keep my distance for a while.”

Stunned, Lorenz watched her go, first as she backed towards the entryway and then when she disappeared out around and onto the staircase. By the time the last of her echoing footsteps vanished, Lorenz was left alone with his thoughts, the cool dark room, and the old blood on the floor.

Good sense told him to give Hilda time. Though he wanted nothing more than to run after her, re-establish that if she apologized he would accept it...he sensed he would only be rubbing salt in whatever wound she was nurturing. If his forgiveness only filled her with more guilt, forcing the issue now could mean toppling their friendship altogether.

If he sought out Claude before Claude was ready, would it end the same way?

Fear shot through him at the idea. After everything that had happened, everything Lorenz still wanted to say, he nearly couldn’t bear the thought of Claude dismissing himself the same way Hilda had. Better to never have a discussion at all, if it might end with a self-imposed emotional exile that Lorenz neither requested nor wanted.

He shut the door to Claude’s keep as he left.

After giving Belladonna two weeks of stall rest to recover from her sprain, Lorenz decided to get her out for some light work. He’d not stepped into the stables with the intent to ride since his return to the palace, and the smell calmed him as soon as he did. When he walked up to her stall, she greeted him with a happy noise. He caught her in her halter, then brushed her coat, picked her feet, and tacked her without much trouble—perfect behavior from an excellent horse.

Before attending Garreg Mach, he had enjoyed riding but aggressively abstained from caring for his mounts himself. They paid people to do that back home, and it made sense to him that a noble shouldn’t be seen with his gloves stained by the suspicious mixture of dirt and excrement that composed horse dust. He’d assumed the students would have their own grooms. When he arrived, learning that he would need to saddle and tack his mount himself had been a shock.

He’d been quite a brat, hadn’t he? One with a refined way of speaking and (he liked to think) a decent heart, but a brat nonetheless.

Now, so long as he was sure to wear the proper attire, he found the whole process rather relaxing. The anxieties of the past month or so had, more than once, brought him face to face with his own mortality. As a result, he found himself cherishing tasks, sights, and smells that he once considered horrid. Here, he could almost pretend things were normal, that the elaborate, cruel attempt on Claude’s life and his own had not happened. He could pretend he was going for a ride, and that when he returned, he would be joining his friends for dinner instead of pretending to sleep on a dismembered bed.

He tested Belladonna’s softness on the ground by backing her, seeing if she was comfortable turning her hind and then her shoulders before sending her in a circle at the walk and trot. Despite her time off, she remained highly sensitive and alert. If not for a few fresh scars on her flank, it was easy to imagine that nothing had happened at all.

Once he was astride, he took her around the training grounds at a walk, focusing on her feel and letting her readjust to him after their time apart. The grounds were surprisingly empty, and Lorenz allowed himself to fade into the ride. It didn’t wash away his substantial worries or fears, but it was just nice. Marianne often talked about how being in the saddle allowed her to _just exist_ , and he appreciated that notion more than ever.

About a third of the way through his planned routine, he thought he saw someone watching him.

At first he thought he noticed a shadow behind one of the trees that framed the turnout pens, near the coop where the pegasi were kept. Lack of sleep and a period of sustained fear had left him feeling nervous, paranoid, so on his next circlet around the arena he checked again only to see nothing there. As if sensing he was distracted, Belladonna coughed loudly, demanding his attention.

Shadow forgotten, Lorenz completed the day’s short exercises and led Belladonna back to her stall.

As he filled her water bucket, Lorenz caught the shape of someone—clearly this time—in his periphery. A figure briefly stood silhouetted by the bright outside light. Lorenz looked up just in time to see a golden half-cape flag around the corner.

Lorenz moved as quickly as he dared, scanning the walkways and lush vegetation on either side of the gravelled area outside. More gardens and walkways were hidden around the palace, and he spied the top of Claude’s head and shoulders disappearing behind a hedge.

“Claude?” he called out, running toward the greenery.

As Lorenz rounded the bend, Claude’s pace noticeably increased down the granite and gravel walkway.

“Just wait for me. _Claude_.” To Claude’s credit, he did not break into a run, but he walked on as if he could not hear anyone calling his name.

And that...made Lorenz’s stomach twist as determination turned into anger. The last time he’d called Claude’s name to such impenetrable silence, Claude had been leaving him in his cell, saying he never wanted to see him again. That he would do it now—

“ _Claude von Riegan_!” Lorenz threw his gloves on the ground hard enough to make them slap against the stepping stones. “So long as I am not rotting _you will look at me_.”

He stopped abruptly, and Lorenz stomped towards the wall of Claude’s back. The archduke of the Alliance could have been a statue, or some tragic lovestruck fool in a Faerghan play frozen solid near the bluebells after a ruthless sudden frost.

By the time Lorenz had stomped up the path, he felt the fire leaving his chest. Pausing to regain his composure, he tried to calm the heart beating hard against his ribs. This was the first time Lorenz had been near Claude since they all met over his bed in the infirmary, where he’d carefully explained events to the others and laid out a new series of precautions they would all be taking. He hadn’t looked at Lorenz then, either.

“Claude, _please_ talk to me,” Lorenz finally said, his voice more gentle as he fought the urge to grasp Claude’s shoulder and whirl him around. “I sincerely wish to give you all the time you need, but this silence wounds me far more than anything that happened between us.”

Finally, Claude turned around.

He looked like he had been to a funeral every day since they last talked. His mouth was set in a miserable, grim line, shaped opposite the clever grin Lorenz had grown so fond of. His smart eyes seemed framed by new wrinkles Lorenz had never noticed before, and his beard had slightly overgrown the bounds of his last trim.

“Well, I’m here.” He held out his arms before letting them fall loudy to his hips. “What do you want me to say, Lorenz? That I messed up? Because I did.” He stepped closer, and now his attention was fixed. “That you were almost hurt and it would have been my fault? Because that’s true, too.”

“You sound quite certain of what I mean to demand for someone who hasn’t talked to me in two weeks.” Lorenz crossed his arms. “What part am I meant to play in this? I’m afraid I did not receive my script.”

Claude shook his head and forcefully grasped the back of his own neck, drawing his gaze somewhere down near the azaleas. “You wanted to talk. We’re talking.”

Hurt lanced through him. “That’s… Never mind.” He tried to stand up a little taller. “Claude...I’m not angry with you.”

“You have every right to—” Claude paused, looked up at Lorenz from under his bangs. “You’re not?”

Lorenz took a deep breath, searching for the well of truth he’d been trying to find for days. “I’ll admit, I don’t appreciate you using me to catch that fiend, but...I cannot deny that the fiend was caught. Your scheme was a clever one that I might have supported were I not at the center of it.”

The tired laugh he got in return was less than welcome, even as Claude shoved his thumbs in his sash. “ _Shapeshifters_. It seemed ridiculous.” He shook his head. “Still means I didn’t have a ton of faith in you. That wasn’t _especially_ romantic of me.”

“Claude, none of us ever could have prepared for this.” Lorenz stepped a half-measure forward. “You needed to protect yourself, and I would never expect you to choose an illogical answer over a logical one.”

“Anger isn’t logical,” Claude spat out, his gaze again darting away. “I could have taken my time. Done a proper investigation—”

“—And denied what your own eyes told you?” Lorenz ran in front of Claude, desperate to keep his focus. “Answer me one thing: why am I still alive?”

“What?”

“You heard me.” He gestured to his own chest, mirroring the spot where Claude’s healing wound was. “The truth is that if I had done what I was accused of, I would have deserved nothing less. As sick as the thought makes me, the idea of being someone who...” A little nauseous swirl came up in his gut. “I’d have been lower than my own cheap grave soil and we both know it.” He moved into Claude once more, stopping just short of touching him, just short of the space that might make him flee. “So I ask again: why am I alive?”

“I can’t answer that,” Claude said. “Or, it’s pretty easy to answer now that we’re both standing here. Having this conversation. _Alive_. I could say anything, and you’d have no way of knowing if a word of it is true.”

“I still want to hear it from you.” Lorenz hated how small his voice sounded.

“I…” Claude’s hand tightened into a fist before relaxing limply at his side. “The truth is that I was angry. I considered sending you to hang. But I also thought about stabbing you in the stomach and leaving you there, or letting you go and then poisoning your tea.” Claude’s face warped, lapsed into a kind of distant horror Lorenz had never seen before. “And that’s all pretty sick of me, huh? But when I saw you there, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.” He shrugged. “That’s it. That’s what happened in my head, and it was ugly as sin.”

“But you _didn’t_. I don’t care what thoughts you had in a fit of rage. I chose you, and I would do it again.” Lorenz choked around his words. “Claude, had you died, that would have been the end of all I’d dreamed. Of anything that would have been worth sacrificing for. I’m _so grateful_ that this scheme did not take the Alliance’s leader from her.” He paused, wondering if this was the right time. “We need you. More than that, I...I have come to care for you. And I have reason to suspect the feeling is mutual. Or _was_ mutual.”

Claude’s face had gone blank again, even as his shoulders turned, his weight shifted as if to flee.

It didn’t matter. Lorenz had to get the rest of it out. He had to tell him—

“If all you see when you look at me is the thing that hurt you,” he said, smothering every trace of sorrow or hope from his voice, “I understand, but I would like to know now.”

“That’s not what I see.” Claude’s voice was so quiet, Lorenz barely heard him. Claude covered his eyes with his palm. “I could ask you the same thing, because I _am_ the man that left you alone in prison and put you in danger.”

Lorenz blinked away frustration. Didn’t the fact that he was there at all suggest that wasn’t the case? Had Claude heard a _word_ he said?

In what could have only been a misinterpretation of Lorenz’s silence, Claude let out another bitter laugh and turned to leave.

Lorenz’s hand was grasping for Claude’s before he had time to consider if that was the correct action. His hands moved in a frenzy, tearing off a leather glove until he pulled Claude’s bare palm to his own chest.

The two of them stood in shock for a moment, Claude staring in open-mouthed shock. Lorenz’s heart raced, and that was the same moment he realized that he could smell drifting rosewood cologne, that their hands were both bare and he couldn’t for the life of him remember the last time they’d touched. In fact, he was sure they’d never touched like this. It had always been through gloves, or skin glancing against one another as they reached for the same item. Claude’s hand was warm against Lorenz’s chilled fingers and steady against his chest.

But he had to focus.

“Do you feel that?” The words could have split open his lungs, as hard as they were to say with Claude so close. “I’m _here_. What do you want?”

Lorenz’s heart could have skipped a beat when Claude came closer, when he slowly slipped the ends of his fingers along the cut of Lorenz’s hair. Face still twisted, torn, Claude tilted his head up until they were close enough to—

“I want to be here, too. More than anything, Earlier you asked why...” He wavered forward into Lorenz’s chest, squeezing his eyes shut. “The real answer is that I _couldn’t_ because I couldn’t stop caring about you.”

Lorenz crashed down into Claude’s mouth as his last ounce of sense left him. When their lips touched, Claude rose to meet him, and Lorenz smothered a keening cry into soft lips as Claude’s other hand wrapped around the back of his neck and pulled him further down. In turn, Lorenz’s hands encircled Claude’s back and drew him closer. He whined into a soft mouth, the tension of the last few weeks—of the last _two years_ —bubbling up and through him as a reminder of how long he’d fantasized about what this kiss would feel like.

It wasn’t like he’d imagined it. He felt alight, like he could do anything, and it was only matched by Claude’s hungry desperation, the apology still hanging on his lips that Lorenz wanted to drag free with anything but words. After the first touch of teeth scraping at his bottom lip, Lorenz finally pulled away. When he did, both of them gasped in each others’ arms.

“You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve wanted to do that,” Lorenz said.

For the first time in weeks, Claude cracked a familiar wild grin. “Two years? Three, tops.” His hand drifted up again, dizzily smoothing down Lorenz’s hair. “Lorenz, I’m so glad—”

“We have time,” Lorenz interjected. “I’m ready. I want to go forward together. The world—my world—is better with you in it.” He took a deep breath. “You are beloved by me.”

Claude kissed him again.

The settee in Claude’s study was hardly large enough for them both, but after they stumbled back and kissed some more, exhaustion inevitably brought them side by side to the green velvet seating. Lorenz laid down first, a long hand extended to Claude as Claude kicked off his boots and fell in after him, kept from the edge by an arm wrapped tightly around his shoulders. One of Claude’s arms became stashed uncomfortably under Lorenz’s ribcage, but that didn’t stop him from holding Lorenz as tightly as he could, pressing his nose into the crook of a slender shoulder.

They must have made quite a sight, laying next to each other on a sofa that was too small for them in two directions.

They both had demons to face. Enemies known and unknown. Letters that needed answers. The memories of causing one another pain were still fresh, and all their pent-up comfort could only do so much.

They stayed there until night fell and rain broke over the city, talking as soft sheets of rain pattered over the cut glass windows of Claude’s study. Tomorrow would be another warm day.


End file.
